Hofstra University's fall Shakespeare Festival is heading into its final week, and the main stage belongs to one of the playwright's strangest adventures. Pericles, Prince of Tyre runs at the Toni and Martin Sosnoff Theater at the John Cranford Adams Playhouse on Hofstra's South Campus in Hempstead through Sunday, November 1.

A romance built on shipwrecks

Pericles is one of Shakespeare's late romances: a prince solves a deadly riddle, flees an angry king, survives storms and shipwrecks across the Mediterranean, wins a tournament for a princess's hand, and loses his family to the sea before fate hands it back. The production is directed by Royston Coppenger, with the festival staged by Hofstra's Department of Drama and Dance.

The remaining evening performances are Friday, October 30 and Saturday, October 31 at 8 p.m., and the festival closes with a 2 p.m. matinee on Sunday, November 1.

Macbeth in an hour, on Halloween

Running alongside the main stage production is Something Wicked, a one-hour version of Macbeth directed by Keith Michael Pinault in the Joan and Donald Schaeffer Black Box Theater at Joseph G. Shapiro Family Hall.

Its schedule tucks into the school week, with late-morning performances on Tuesday, October 27 at 11 a.m. and Thursday, October 29 at 11 a.m., an evening performance on Thursday, October 29 at 8 p.m., and a 3 p.m. performance on Halloween afternoon, Saturday, October 31. Between the two stages, there are seven chances to see Shakespeare at Hofstra over the festival's final six days.

A tradition since 1950

Hofstra has been staging an annual Shakespeare festival longer than almost anything else on its calendar. The university's own program materials for its 1996 staging of Pericles identified that year's event as the 47th annual festival, which places the tradition's beginnings in 1950, when the university was barely 15 years old. This fall's Pericles brings back a play the festival also staged in 1996.

What follows on the Hofstra stage

The festival closes the department's Shakespeare calendar for the year, but not its season. The Fall Dance Concert, with work by faculty and guest choreographers, takes over the Sosnoff Theater November 19 through 22, and the Fall Student Rep festival of student acting, directing and dance runs December 4 through 7 in the Black Box.

Going

Performances are at the Adams Playhouse on Hofstra's South Campus in Hempstead, with the one-hour Macbeth at the Schaeffer Black Box Theater in Shapiro Family Hall. Tickets are sold through the Department of Drama and Dance's online shop, linked from the department's events page at hofstra.edu. The Pericles evening shows are October 30 and 31 at 8 p.m., and the closing matinee is November 1 at 2 p.m.

Sources