Eminent Twin Cities playwright Jeffrey Hatcher has such a strong public persona as a cultured wit that it's hard to imagine him as an insecure 11-year-old. Fortunately, we get some help in that department in "Jeffrey Hatcher's Hamlet," which premiered Thursday to open the 40th season of the Illusion Theater in Minneapolis.

The 80-minute one-act is set in a classroom, and the chalkboard is actually a screen for projected images, mostly black-and-white. In one of them, we see a dour little Jeffrey, suited up and wearing his deerstalker Sherlock Holmes detective cap. We don't have to imagine his isolation and loneliness. We see it on his pinched, pudgy face. This is not a young man destined for great things on the playing field.

Lucky for him, he finds theater, where roles can be played and bonds can be formed in the pursuit of a common purpose.

His "Hamlet" is a story of his aha! moment. It's 1967 in Steubenville, Ohio. Jeffrey's fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. K. Smith, is famous for putting on plays at the school. Usually the choices are uninspired or predictable. But Jeffrey, who had been to Washington with his dad the year before and visited the Folger Shakespeare Library, suggests "Hamlet." The teacher agrees and charges Jeffrey with producing and directing Shakespeare's tragedy. Of course, he hasn't read it. But he finds an illustrated version, and with the help of his typing mother, quickly has a script.

The Illusion production is a walk through a roomful of Hatcher memories (Dean Holzman designed the intimate, realistic set). Director Michael Robins places Hatcher in the many stations of his physical and emotional fifth-grade life — from the teacher's desk to his own, from a schoolboy crush to a desire to get even with a popular boy whom, everyone agrees, should be the lead in the play.

This "Hamlet," which toured the state in previews, also is about how a pursuit can give a young man purpose and meaning. Hatcher offers a valentine to theater, a place where you can act out and correct things that you can't change in real life. For example, he acts out, in quite a dance, a sword fight. The actor also shows us how he tried to stab a rival with a rapier in the name of play.

In his writing as well as acting, Hatcher never has been one for big expression, much less bombast. A subtle English sensibility is his stock in trade. He portrays his characters in "Hamlet" in a polite, quite dignified range. Even the cads come off as honor students having bad days.

Still, this is not to suggest that he fails to hold our attention throughout this one-man show. To the contrary, he captures us with his well-contained wit.

It's just that, for once, you want to see him stretch way out in a character, and blow the lid off the whole thing. But then again, that wouldn't be "Jeffrey Hatcher's Hamlet." Maybe next we can have"Jeffrey Hatcher's Titus Andronicus"?

Rohan Preston • 612-673-4390