ACTOR RELISHES RETURN TO HIS BARTER ROOTS

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, April 9, 1993                   TAG: 9304090239
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: ABINGDON                                LENGTH: Medium
ACTOR RELISHES RETURN TO HIS BARTER ROOTS
For acting couple Jerry and Diane Hardin, coming to Barter Theatre was like coming home.
They met at Barter, as Barter Award winners chosen by prestigious actors to join the Barter troupe. Diane's wedding dress came from the Barter dressing room. A trunk from among Barter props became their first child's basinet.
They came back in April for Jerry Hardin to perform a one-man show, "Mark Twain: One Man and His World," by way of the TV series, "Star Trek: The Next Generation." It had its premiere performance earlier this month at Barter where Hardin performed it four times.
Hardin portrayed the 19th-century writer and humorist in a two-part show introducing the Trek series' 1992 season with a time-travel story. The segment was directed by Les Landau.
"This gentleman is primarily responsible for my doing Twain. He took me aside and told me I should do it," Hardin said of Landau, who directed the premiere performance for Barter, which may now go on the road.
Hardin had worked for the late Gene Roddenberry long before Roddenberry created the first "Star Trek" series, on a show that Roddenberry produced about how the Miranda law came about. "And he remembered me, bless his sweet heart," Hardin said.
"This was a great adventure," he said, "doing a period piece and then pushing it into a futuristic piece."
Trek's "Next Generation" series has now completed nearly twice as many episodes as the original '60s "Star Trek" that went into perpetual syndication and big-budget movies. Hardin said it was fun working with the actors on the "Next Generation" series.
"That's one of the happier companies that's been together that long," he said. "That's unusual . . . This group is remarkable in that respect, I think, and they are still very much focused on doing a good job."
And Hardin became focused on Twain.
"What he had to say is not time-constricted in any way. He was interested in people, and particularly those people who pushed back boundaries," Hardin said.
Actor Hal Holbrook has been doing a Mark Twain show for years. Hardin has seen it and said it is brilliant. But he said Twain generated so much material that he believes there is only one segment where he and Holbrook use the same piece.
"Apart from all of his writings, he did jillions of after-dinner speeches," Hardin said. And Twain - born Samuel Langhorne Clemens - wrote them in advance and crafted them carefully, even though he gave the impression of talking off the cuff.
Hardin spent his spare time getting reacquainted with Abingdon, eating in some of its smaller restaurants and listening to its residents converse around him.
He remembered how the late Robert Porterfield, who founded Barter during the Depression, got furnishings from the about-to-be-demolished Empire Theatre in New York moved to Barter, using a railroad ticket for some of it.
"I don't know how he got away with that," Hardin said. "But he got it all down here. . . . He sort of did it off-hand with a certain amount of cleverness."
He also recalled Porterfield's traditional introduction at each Barter performance, concluding with: "If you like us, talk about us; if you don't, just keep your mouth shut." Hardin gave a perfect imitation, including the little squeak that Porterfield would get in his voice when he said it.
"This is a great house to play," he said. "You can see a fair number of people in here, and it feels very intimate. . . . We had a lot of good times here."
Diane Hardin, posing outside the theater with her husband for a photo, remembered the last time she had posed in the same spot - with Porterfield and actor Dennis King.
She got teary, she said, when she re-entered the theater and memories began flooding back.
She now teaches acting and manages a group of young professionals. He has performed in more than 20 films and even more TV series as well as on stage.
And it would seem that there is a Barter gene, judging from their children's pursuits: Melora is an actress in both film and television, and Shawn is a film director with experience in documentaries, shorts, commercials and features who was recently voted into the Director's Guild of America.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB