Theater: Kevin Kline's Ultimate Test

When Kevin Kline was a freshman at Indiana University, his ambition was clear: to become a concert pianist. But one day, as he and fellow students were watching auditions for a campus production of Macbeth, the director pressed them all to read for roles. The lines, Kline recalls, "meant nothing to me--they might as well have been in Croatian. I just used the deepest voice I could and tried to sound Shakespearean." That was enough to get him cast as a "bleeding sergeant" who speaks 30 lines of verse, collapses and is carried offstage in Act I--"to wait two and a half hours for the curtain call."

Twenty-one years, two Tony awards and five movies later, Kline, 38, has established himself as one of the most diverse and appealing actors of his generation, at home on Broadway as a runaway soldier in Shaw's Arms and the Man or a rapacious, loony buccaneer in The Pirates of Penzance, onscreen as a psychotic lover in Sophie's Choice or as a nice-guy running-shoe entrepreneur in The Big Chill. Eager for acceptance as a classical performer, he has performed Richard III and Henry V for Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park. Last week Kline returned to Papp's Public Theater off Broadway and took on the ultimate challenge: Hamlet.

To essay the role of the brooding, mordantly comic, half-mad prince is to brave comparison with Garrick and Booth, Burton and Olivier. Kline may not yet rank among that pantheon, but he has vaulted over his contemporaries with this production. His performance ripens and changes night by night. It still seems unfinished in some scenes, too cautious in others, and is on the whole a bit quiet and constrained to energize a melodrama nearly four hours long. But he speaks the text with clarity and command, and he makes Hamlet believable as a whirlpool of contradictions: an inconstant avenger, a jealous yet indifferent lover, a humane moralist who kills innocents without remorse. Rather than impose a defining personality to achieve cohesion, Kline glories in the character's variety. Spontaneity and impulse are key to his approach. Exploring the role in rehearsal, Kline improvised without warning, flopping onto the floor when he was meant to sit, tearing pages from a book and pasting them onto Polonius' head with spit. Between scenes he would pounce on a piano or indulge what friends josh as chronic hypochondria by relaxing his back in a vibrating armchair, transported from his book-lined apartment in an Upper West Side brownstone. Kline and the orderly, meticulous director Liviu Ciulei clashed so often that Producer Papp joined in the final staging.

Kline can be volatile: the cast of Pirates saw him punch huge holes in his dressing-room walls out of frustration with a performance. Yet his colleagues speak with deep affection. Says Glenn Close, a co-star in The Big Chill: "He was a worrier, unbelievably insecure. We would always tease him about how much he would look in the mirror at himself. He said that he thought his nose looked like a potato and that he had no upper lip."