By ANNA O’DONOGHUE

Pericles has always been a literary underdog. One of Shakespeare's later plays, most scholars agree that it was written with a collaborator (the majority credit George Wilkins)—and they think it shows. The play has been attacked by centuries of critics, who have attributed only the final scenes to Shakespeare and dismissed the first half of the play as a sprawling, unwieldy epic written by a young hack. Pericles didn't even make it into the First Folio, the first compilation of Shakespeare's collected works, and was only acknowledged as part of the canon in the Third Folio of 1664.

A sketch by costume designer Suttirat Anne Larlarb for the princess Thaisa.

Low critical esteem notwithstanding, by 1642 Pericles had become one of Shakespeare's most published and produced plays, with more quarto editions than Hamlet. It may not have "To be or not to be"—but Hamlet doesn't have pirates. The play's bizarre theatricality and massive scope are thrilling to audiences and present exciting challenges in production. And while it may still not be the average theatergoer's first association with Shakespeare, its profile in the modern theater world is rising. In the last few years, Pericles has found its way into the seasons of numerous respected regional theaters and Shakespeare festivals—and, this month, onto the Juilliard stage, as the third-year actors make their debuts in the Drama Theater with their final production of the season.

Narrated by 14th-century poet John Gower, Pericles is a fairy tale of epic proportions, chronicling the trials and adventures of its title character. The play begins in the kingdom of Antioch, where Antiochus, the king, has promised his daughter to the man who can solve a particular riddle. The catch: if the suitor fails, he will be killed. Pericles figures out the riddle, but in the answer lies a terrible secret. Faced with death if he does not answer, and what he is sure will be death if he does, he flees.

A costume sketch by Suttirat Anne Larlarb for Simonides.

Thus begins a long journey in search of safety and peace of mind. Along the way, he saves the kingdom of Tarsus from a terrible famine, wins a duel and the hand of the beautiful princess Thaisa in Pentapolis, and has a child—but encounters terrible storms at sea, the loss of his wife, and desperation. Leaving Pericles in the agony of loss, the story shifts to Marina, his daughter, whom he leaves under the care of the rulers of Tarsus. Marina is similarly beset by tribulations: she must contend with assassination attempts, pirate kidnappers, and a brothel which markets her virginity as the town prize. But Pericles and Marina, steadfast in their pursuit of honor and virtue, both persevere, and the story culminates in a thrilling family reunion.

Timothy Douglas, who returns to Juilliard to direct the play after last year's fourth-year production of The Marriage of Figaro, has a theory about why the play is suddenly appearing everywhere: Pericles is a story that the contemporary world desperately needs. Critics of the play complain that Pericles is too passive to be a compelling hero—but Douglas thinks they're missing the point. "He's not passive; he's constant. Pericles and Marina change the world, literally, by not changing themselves. The hardest thing in the world is to remain constant. And that's why the play is being done now, whether people choose it consciously for those reasons or not. With everything that's going on today, we need people like the two of them to remain forthright and move through the world unchanged."

A costume sketch by Suttirat Anne Larlarb for Diana.

Douglas's passion for Pericles is old and deep; as an actor at Yale Drama School, it provided his first experience in a Shakespeare play—"I had about four lines"—and has been his favorite ever since. He has directed the play three times in workshop form, "trying to crack it"—but this time, he thinks he's got it. The idea came to him mid-rehearsals for the last workshop: he would set the play in outer space.

Douglas insists the idea is not so far-fetched: "The story is huge. There's magic, there's storms; this is the only play in which we travel to six different locations—it's just all over the place. And I don't think that's a fluke." Instead of viewing the play's idiosyncrasies as flaws, Douglas sees them as opportunities for exploration: "The scope is just huge and our job is not to shy away from that, but to create a palette that can support it." So the kingdoms will each be planets, and travel by ship becomes space travel, one of the crucial elements to Douglas's concept: "There are these two storms at sea, which people usually just gloss over. But when the play was originally set, if you told someone you were going off to sea, they didn't expect to see you again! And the fact that Pericles survives two storms, it's huge. So I want to give the audience a sense of the scope of the traveling."

Douglas's innovation didn't stop there. There were still "other major things to crack"—the most important of which was the priestess Diana, who appears to Pericles in a dream near the end of the play. "In all these productions I've seen, the importance of Diana gets short shrift. She's mentioned in almost half of Shakespeare's 36 plays, and this is the only one in which she shows up. That's huge! That moment has to be honored." A '70s pop song heard over a loudspeaker one day provided him with an epiphany (as well as inspiration for the choice of music underscoring the production). But Douglas is quick to add that his primary focus is honoring the play and the text: "That's first with me always. In fact, I usually give so many people hell about contextualizing Shakespeare, because I so rarely see it work without sacrificing the integrity of the text. I only want to do it if it illuminates the world of the play, helps us understand the story in a deeper, more immediate way."

Shakespeare's Pericles Drama Theater Tuesday-Wednesday, May 16-17, and Saturday-Sunday, May 20-21, 8 p.m. For ticket information, please see the calendar.

And for Douglas, Pericles is a powerful and important story to tell, one of self-discovery and integrity. Pericles is a good person trying to find his place in the universe, so to speak, but what he must learn, through shipwrecks and disasters, is to listen to his inner voice. "It's really an ultimate love story—a love of finding out what you were set on this planet to do."

As the third-year actors bring this play (and Douglas's otherworldly vision) to life, they will have the opportunity to tap into their own inner voices, to use their imaginative and expressive powers—and to prove that a few centuries of critics were just thinking in the wrong solar system.

Third-year drama student Anna O'Donoghue is the recipient of the 2006 Juilliard Journal Award.