I HAD AN ENGLISH teacher who believed the works of William Shakespeare read far better than they played. After four years in drama school and viewings of at least three dozen separate Shakespearean productions, I have grown to agree with his viewpoint -- all pretense be damned. I confidently defy anyone who's not clutching a bachelor's degree in theater in one hand and an Oxford English Dictionary in the other to accurately define the term "bare bodkin" to me. And there, as it were, is the rub. Each of Shakespeare's plays has been adapted, modernized, deconstructed, studied, and spoofed ad nauseam, and yet 90 percent of Shakespeare's dialogue continues to go right over most people's heads.

GREX Productions' Three Deaths in Denmark attempts to correct this dilemma by hacking Hamlet into smaller, more manageable chunks and presenting it as "an examination of how [Hamlet's characters] seek revenge for the deaths of their fathers" -- Hamlet Lite, so to speak. Three Deaths features those scenes which pertain directly to this rather academic examination -- effectively slashing darn near an hour of archaic blah-blah from Shakespeare's original text.

The capable four-member cast -- Julie Brokaw, Joseph DeLorenzo, Reginald A. Jackson and James Newman -- share the characters, volleying the roles of Hamlet, Laertes, Ophelia, and Fortinbras et al. back and forth between them, with varying degrees of success and no small amount of confusion. Dawn Box's staging and direction borrow heavily from the classical Greeks: characters don featureless masks and deliver dialogue in unison, Greek-chorus style. The set is ambient and stark (plywood platforms and sheet metal), and the sound and lighting is intense and moody. And although the most potent and well-known scenes of the tragedy are left intact and performed well -- Ophelia goes for a swim, Daddy stops by for a posthumous "howdy do" -- Three Deaths in Denmark doesn't really deliver a more accessible Hamlet. Only a shorter one.