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Meet a New Prince of the RSC.(Long Wharf Theatre, New Haven, Connecticut)(Review) (theater review) Sunday Mercury; 8/1/2004 American Theatre; 5/1/2000; WOLF, MATT "It's the best thing I've ever done," Rupert Penry-Jones remarks off-handedly of his starring role in Schiller's Don Carlos for the Royal Shakespeare company. That's saying quite a bit, given the 29-year-old Englishman's impressive track record to date. For a spell, Penry-Jones seemed incapable of spending much stage time clothed, if the actor's, uh, revealing performances in the premieres of Paper Husband (playing the layabout boyfriend of the [acute{e}]migr[acute{e}] heroine) and Edward Albee's The Play About the Baby (as the father to the eponymous child) are any guide. In Don Carlos, by contrast, the emotions are what get laid bare in a rarely seen historical drama that director Gale Edwards has brought blazingly alive. Don Carlos is one of five productions that the RSC is shopping over to the States this season, though Penry-Jones's concurrent turn as Alcibiades In Timon of Athens won't be among them. Harriet Walter and Antony Sher, the latter in his first American stage turn since his Tony-nominated Broadway debut in Stanley, play the Macbeths at Connecticut's Long Wharf Theatre June 15-24 as part of New Haven's International Festival of Arts & Ideas, with Gregory Doran (Sher's real-life partner) directing. During that time, Lindsay Posner's rumbustious take on The Taming of the Shrew arrives at San Francisco's Herbst Theater, June 22-July 2. But it's the trio heading in May for the Brooklyn Academy of Music--director Michael Boyd's bawdy take on a Midsummer Night's Dream and T.S. Eliot's gloriously spectral The Family Reunion, directed by Adrian Noble, join the Schiller revival-that afford the greatest concentration of talent. And with Penry-Jones in the driver's seat, the evening has real dash--so what if the real 16th- century prince was born physically deformed and died at age 23? "The extremities he's pushed to," says Penry-Jones of a role that the actor couldn't physically resemble less, "you think he's going to die every minute. He loves to the extreme, hates to the extreme--does everything to extremes. It's a heavyweight part." It's also more than passingly reminiscent of Hamlet, which puts center-stage a comparably tormented monarch-to-be plagued by a mother fixation, except that the object of Don Carlos's desire is his young stepmother Elizabeth of Valois, bride to the prince's snarling father, Philip II. "It's kind of like Don Hamlet," Penry-Jones laughs of his current assignment, gently deflecting the suggestion that he should segue immediately to literature's most celebrated Dane. "I'd love to play Hamlet one day, but not too soon. And anyway," he adds, "everyone who sees Hamlet knows exactly what's going to happen. This guy has the same emotional range, but nobody knows the lines." Matt Wolf writes regularly about London theatre. ©2004 COPYRIGHT 2000 Theatre Communications Group (UK) Limited.