Plays about fatally flawed leaders and messy succession struggles will never not be timely, but they seem especially freighted now. I’m not even primarily thinking about the wrenching drama playing out in this year’s U.S. presidential election (though it is difficult for the moment to avoid thinking about it). I’m also pondering what it means for leaders at a number of major American theatres to program sweeping revivals of Shakespeare plays about ambition and upheaval at a time when the theatre field itself roils with conflict and challenges: Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s Richard III, Shakespeare Theatre Company’s starry Macbeth (the subject of an in-depth feature in our Summer print issue), and, even more lavishly, the Guthrie’s recent Henriad trilogy.
The Old Globe’s current Henry 6 is part of this go-big-or-go-home moment. An adaptation of a lesser known Shakespeare trilogy—Henry VI: Part 1-3, written early in the Bard’s career but slotting into the historical timeline between two of his most popular efforts, the Henry IV/V triad and Richard III—into a two-play repertory by Globe artistic director Barry Edelstein, Henry 6 is a sprawling serial tracing key players in the War of the Roses between the Lancasters and the Yorks. Part one, “Flowers and France,” started previews on June 30, and part two, “Riot and Reckoning,” began previews this week; both open on the weekend of July 19-20 and run through the weekend of Sept. 14-15 on the Globe’s outdoor Lowell Davies Festival stage, with a cast of 32 generously supplemented by “virtual” performers—i.e., folks from the Globe’s longstanding arts engagement partnerships with 50 local community-based organizations (a la the Public Theater’s Public Works program).
Turning to Shakespeare is hardly out of character for these theatres or their directors: At Chicago Shakes and D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre, two Brits, Edward Hall and Simon Godwin, have distinguished track records with the Bard, as do the Guthrie’s Joseph Haj and the Globe’s Barry Edelstein (author of Thinking Shakespeare). But the best reason to return to these plays, of course, is not to seek the comfort of a brand name but to wrestle anew with their complicated insights into power and frailty, statecraft and leadership, betrayal and heroism, identity and universality. In perhaps less dramatic but hardly inconsequential ways, American theatres have been struggling with some of these same quandaries. And one way a theatre institution can speak is not only with the stories it puts on its stage but with the scale and integrity of its storytelling; the meaning of a theatre production is not only in the words its actors say but in the actions of the institution. It’s about the who and how as much as the what.
I spoke to Edelstein last month as Henry 6 was in rehearsals about the state of the field, about Shakespeare’s history plays, and about the Globe’s arts engagement efforts. Following are excerpts from that conversation.
ROB WEINERT-KENDT: First, the question I’m asking every theatre leader I talk to: How is the Old Globe faring in these post-lockdown times? Are audiences back?
BARRY EDELSTEIN: People are coming, and we’re doing great work; we’ve had an amazing run of really good shows by great artists, and the work that we’re doing in the community is stunningly impactful and successful. So that’s the headline: We’re functioning as a theatre and people are coming back. We’re not at the level of ticket sales we were before the pandemic, but it’s trending upward. But the story in the field is that non-production costs are up by 35 percent, and production costs are up by somewhere between 30 and 40 percent. When you’re a nonprofit and costs go up by 35 percent, revenues have to go up by 35 percent or you’re in trouble. Revenues haven’t gone up by 35 percent; in fact, they’re down.
So you have a series of bad choices. You can cut, which is what a lot of theatres do: Pull back programming, lay people off. Second, you can change your programming to The Odd Couple and My Fair Lady and The Importance of Being Earnest. We’re seeing theatres do that. You can have a longtime benefactor die and leave you $30 million; we’re seeing every once in a while somebody do that. Or you can burn cash reserves. That’s the Globe’s path: We have not cut staff, we have not cut programming. We’ve made some percentage cuts and shortened the run of a couple of plays; we’ve trimmed places here and there. But we’re spending the remaining SVOG [Shuttered Venue Operators Grant] money that we put away during the pandemic; we’ve got about three more years of cash reserves before we are in the same place that the theatres that have had to cut are now. So we are doing great, we haven’t cut, we’re producing art, people are starting to come back—but we’ve got a sword of Damocles hanging over our head that’s going to drop in two to three years if we don’t find something significant to change the status quo.
At the Guthrie, where they just did a big Henriad in repertory, as you’re now doing, they recently announced a nearly $4 million deficit.
Well, that deficit represents 8 or 9 percent of their annual budget. You have to keep it in perspective. That’s about what we’re seeing at the Globe too; we’re running an 8 or 9 percent deficit every year. The math is simple: The field has an 8 to 12 percent structural deficit built in; that’s the new reality of the American theatre, and the field has no idea how to fill that. A deus ex machina in the form of President Biden signing a bill fills it; this is what Oskar Eustis is trying to address with the STAGE Act. Or Roy Cockrum saying, “Here’s a giant grant for you,” as he did for Henry 6, that fills it. Or Paula and Brian Powers saying, “Here’s $2 million to add jet fuel to your new-play development program,” that fills it. Ken Ludwig’s Murder on the Orient Express fills it.
So we’re all looking at a 10 percent pothole and going: What can I do to fill it? We should not panic over a 10 percent problem, because we can survive for a few years with a 10 percent problem. As the artistic director of a giant American theatre, I want to resist the panic. But I do want to say, yeah, there’s a real structural problem, and if we don’t fix it, there’s going to be a huge crisis soon.
For now, you’re taking a big swing, turning Shakespeare’s three Henry VI plays into a two-part epic you’re calling Henry 6. I know the Henry IV and V cycle a bit better than these plays. Can you tell me about why you chose these plays and how you arrived at this project now?
I came across the plays in graduate school and fell in love with them. There is an exuberance to them. The Shakespeare writing these places is young man in his 20s, and he’s on the make. So he’s going, “I’m going to do a battle scene, and right next to it I’m going to do a romance. Then I’m going to have a party where people take their clothes off, and then I’m going to have some witches show up. And then some politicians doing a big rhetorical debate scene.” There is a sense of youthful, joyous celebration of the talent that this writer knows he has that just I find completely beguiling. Next year the Globe turns 90 years old, and it has never produced these three plays. So I thought I should do them.
Of course, they have, like, 170 named characters, and you can’t do any one of them in isolation, because they don’t make sense if you don’t do the whole sweep. So you either get companies that will say, as Propeller did, let’s do it with eight people; otherwise it takes a giant theatre company with the resources to do it big. That’s when Roy Cockrum called me in 2017 and said, “I like the Globe, and I give out grants so people can do audacious projects. Whatta ya got?” And I said, “Well, I’ve been really thinking about how to complete the Shakespeare canon and doing Henry VI, parts 1, 2, and 3, and we’re going to have a big community component to bring the arts engagement side of the Globe and the art-making side of the Globe together.” Roy said, “Great,” and that was the golden ticket that made it possible for us to do it.
Can you tell me about how you’ve turned three plays into two?
Well, because I knew I was not going to do Richard III, that gave me a lot of liberty to play fast and loose with Henry VI: Part 3, which is very concerned with laying pipe for Richard III. I just got rid of all of that. In my version of these plays, the first thing that happens is Henry VI is born, and the last thing that happens is Henry VI dies. Once I came up with that, I won’t say it was easy—it was an incredibly long process trying to put this thing together—but at least there was a narrative structure I felt I could hang my hat on.
The big image that’s in these plays, this big Elizabethan concept, is the wheel of fortune. So many Shakespeare plays go: Somebody rises up, they’re there for a second, then they go down and somebody else rises up, they’re there for a second and they go down, somebody rises up, and so on. That’s very clearly the dramaturgical principle: fortune’s wheel bringing somebody up and then bringing them down and somebody else coming up and somebody else coming down. So in the first play you see Talbot come up and come down; you see Joan come up and come down; Gloucester, Eleanor, Suffolk, the cardinal. It is this cycle of greedy, grasping people lusting for power, and being done.
They each get a turn on the wheel, then they’re crushed by it.
And they change costumes and come back as another character, which I think is kind of fun. The other big thing about the plays, and this is what I remember when I first studied them in graduate school at Oxford, is that when Talbot dies, it’s not just the death of a man but the end of a worldview which has to do with honor and chivalry. Talbot is the last person to believe that there is a set of values attached to England that are bigger than any one person. That’s gone when he’s dead, so the three plays are about what happens to a country when politics are divorced from values. Because nobody else, including King Henry, has a larger vision of England, so you’re watching these grasping people who see power as an end in itself, who do not see power as a means to achieve social ends, who do not believe in a set of values that are larger than themselves. To me that’s compelling. It’s also timely, unfortunately.
There’s also the joy of how unfamiliar the plays are, because you work on scenes, and you go, Wow. There’s Henry’s molehill speech, this amazing soliloquy about how vicious the civil war is, which is followed by a scene in which a man walks in with a dead body in his arms, a soldier he’s killed, and then he discovers that the soldier is his father, and on the other side, a man walks in with a dead body in his arms and discovers that the soldier that he’s killed is his son. It’s a stunning scene, every bit as great as any of the set pieces we know from Lear or The Winter’s Tale or Much Ado. But you just don’t know it. So the joy of discovering it, and feeling like we’re working on a new play that happens to be by Shakespeare, is a tremendous gas. All of us in rehearsal are having a thrilling time.
In reading the plays, I noticed that not only the structure but your stage directions are quite different from the originals. But like Shakespeare, you don’t give a lot of detail. There are sections that just say things like, “A battle ensues; the English destroy the French.” How much of a battle gets staged, then? And what kind of battle? I guess I’m also asking what period or world your version is set in.
It starts in period, and then when Talbot dies, it begins to get contemporary, so by the time we’re in the second play, it’s modern dress. I mean, there are no cell phones or video cameras or Brioni suits; it’s a modern silhouette that is kind of timeless. The set is designed by Lawrence Moten. We looked at Ming Cho Lee’s sets at the Delacorte in the early ’60s, when he was doing all these history plays, and we asked ourselves, what’s the 21st-century version of one of those scaffold sets? Because they were perfect vehicles for doing these giant Shakespeare epics. They have all these levels, and they’re like this very simple machine that delivers the play.
It’s jarring to find Joan of Arc in this play, especially the way Shakespeare writes her.
Yeah, he’s being a stereotypical Englishman hating on the French; he totally stacks the deck against her. It’s actually very ugly, what he does. So we’ve been trying to figure out, do we want to endorse that terrible 16th-century English xenophobia, or do we want to find out something that puts that into a kind of context? The terrible scene where her father shows up and says she’s a harlot—I cut that.
You know, the misogyny aimed at her and at Margaret is overwhelming; so is the venom aimed toward the disabled Richard. In a 21st-century production of these plays, you have to figure out some kind of context for that material, either by upending and exposing it, or by minimizing it, or by humanizing the characters who are being assaulted. We’re looking at all that stuff. What we’ve found so far is that each of these characters has an incredibly strong case to make on their own behalf. Margaret is incredibly compelling, and she’s got a great case to make because Henry is such a terrible king. She’s been brought over on false pretenses, so she’s got no choice but to take over and get the job done. So you see all the misogynistic venom directed against her in the context of a woman who’s got agency—that’s what is prompting these men to circle the wagons and be so horrible in response.
There are a lot of gender politics to explore in these plays, not least the notion—which you also see in Richard II—that unmanly or feminized leaders are equated with weakness, impotence, decline.
I gotta tell you, that’s not one of the central interests of this production. It’s there, and one could put together a production of Henry 6 that’s all about gender. What we’re doing is a production of Henry 6 that’s about the epic scope of the story, and about the political point of a values-free society. It’s also about, from the institution’s point of view, integrating the arts engagement work of the Old Globe and the professional art-making work of the Globe into one thing. This is not, “Barry has a visionary idea of these plays.” That’s not what we’re doing. We’re celebrating the completion of the canon; the Globe is one of 10 American theatres, I think, that have done all 36 Shakespeare plays. Which is not to say it’s not going to be a compelling, interestingly thought through production.
Say more about the community engagement aspect.
The Globe has been doing this very high-level arts engagement work with something like 50 community-based nonprofits for the 12 years I’ve been here. There are a couple of groups in among our 50 that are very close to us, who’ve been doing work with the Old Globe now for years and are really good at making theatre. We thought, how can we get them onstage? The George L. Stephens Fourth District Senior Resource Center is one of our closest community partners. It’s in the historic Black neighborhood of San Diego, and it’s sort of a community center where Black seniors eat and do activities. I said, “We should get them in the show.” We realized there was no way we were going to be able to get here six nights a week, so we decided to film them. I started looking around for where they could go, and I came up with: In these scene where we see a bunch of conjurers come into Eleanor’s house to prophesy, one of them puts on a giant choir robe and spreads his arms, and then projected on his chest will be the seniors that we filmed doing those lines. There will also be big crowd scenes where we had 250 San Diegans come in and we filmed them, and they’re gonna be projected onto the stage, so we’re gonna get hundreds of people on our stage virtually, so that they don’t have to be there every night.
Also, six months ago the set designer, the costume designer, and the lighting designer started coming out to San Diego and doing workshops with community members. You’ll see early in the second play, there’s a scene where York’s sons are on the field and the sun comes up in the sky, then a second sun comes up in the sky, then a third sun comes up in the sky. It’s this famous scene where there are three suns in the sky. Lawrence Moten worked with our community members on the design of those suns, and the work that the community members did is going to show up in the show. Also, Julián Mesri, who is composing the score, came out to San Diego about a month ago and gathered 50 singers, not professional singers, just community members, and he recorded them doing choral singing. That’s going to be in the show. So for six months now, the designers have been here, working with the community to develop artistic material that’s actually going to be in the show. This theatre, for a decade, has been building this arts engagement infrastructure, and is now merging it with our mainstage work.
What can you tell me about the cast?
Henry is played by an Indian actor named Keshav Moodliar, and the great actress Mahira Kakkar is in the show too. She watched the first act the other day and she said it’s like watching a Bollywood movie. That’s exactly right. First of all, there’s no regard for tonal consistency. Shakespeare doesn’t care: I’m going to be funny; now I’m going to kill somebody. Our 21st-century idea that tone has to be consistent? He just didn’t care about that, and it’s a joy.
Rob Weinert-Kendt (he/him) is editor-in-chief of American Theatre.
