The Henriad @ Shakespeare Dallas
—Sam Lisman
Four hundred years ago—almost to the day—John Heminges and Henry Condell bequeathed a rich legacy, one might say, unto the world: the (almost) collected works of William Shakespeare that we call the First Folio. It may be presumptuous of me to say, but they made a mistake (or two if you count the cannon in Henry VIII, which burned down the Globe Theatre, costing us the official scripts of most of the plays): they labeled the Plantagenet plays as “Histories.” They are not. Shakespeare took massive liberties with the history—as any good writer would—giving us plays that are, at best, “based on a true story.” Moreover, by classifying them as such, they obscured the fact that these are actually tragedies comparable to any of those we call the best (including not only Hamlet, Lear, and Macbeth, but also Oedipus, Antigone, etc.).
With this in mind, I was greatly excited about the possibilities for new audiences when Shakespeare Dallas announced a staged reading of what has become known (since the ’60s or thereabouts) as The Henriad (that is, Richard II, both parts of Henry IV, and Henry V) to be held over four successive nights. at Samuell-Grand Amphitheatre. (Full disclosure: I’m a member of the Shakespeare Dallas Book Club). Alas, the North Texas Weather Gods had different plans for the first of the two weekends: Richard was rained out almost immediately (before we even got the “sceptered isle” speech), and Henry V was cancelled following the unseasonably bitter cold from the night before. So the first weekend was simply Henry IV, but hope springs eternal at Samuell-Grand, and the shows should go on this weekend (good Lord willing).
It's almost unheard of to see these four plays together on stage (and outside of a reading, it’s close to impossible for a single cast to perform four fully staged plays concurrently), so one has to look to film for examples. Orson Welles, of course, focused in on Falstaff as the tragic hero of the tale, in his magnificent Chimes at Midnight (1965). More traditionally, adaptations of the tetralogy either focus on Henry Bolingbroke gaining the crown (but finding that achieving his goal doesn’t bring him peace or happiness), or center it around the maturation of Prince Hal into a king. In this case, by presenting all four plays as a cluster, there’s no need to make such decisions. Each of those overlapping stories, along with Richard’s, can shine without diminishing the others—and, being at the park, we are able to “sit upon the ground / and tell sad stories of the death of kings” just as Richard bids us to do.
And for this grand retelling, Shakespeare Dallas’s Interim Artistic Director (and the director of these plays), Jenni Stewart, has assembled an all-star cast. Everyone plays multiple roles (I believe around 80, in total), but the primary players consist of Bryan Pitts as Henry IV, Parker Gray as Henry V (Prince Hal), John Flores as Falstaff, Nicole Berastequi as Hotspur, Christian Taylor as Richard II, and TA Taylor as John of Gaunt. Add to them Dennis Raveneau, Joanna Schellenberg, Stormi Demerson, Maryam Baig, Rosaura Cruz, Adrian Godinez, and Francine Gonzalez, and you’ve got a veritable who’s who of DFW’s best talent.
And they breathed fire, greatly welcome against the weekend’s cold.
Pitts’s baritone was commanding and authoritative, his glance stern, while Gray’s portrayal of Prince Hal was surprisingly angry, with a much sharper edge than most bring to his banter with Falstaff and his interactions with his father (although at times he did sound remarkably like Frederick Frankenstein, but that’s not important right now). Berastequi’s Henry Percy perfectly lived up to his sobriquet of Hotspur, capturing the impatience that personified him, while her second role as Doll Tearsheet was delivered in the exact voice of the original Harley Quinn character from the ’90s Batman animated series.
Unfortunately, we only had one scene of Christian Taylor’s haughty Richard II and his father, TA Taylor’s wise and stately John of Gaunt. We did get all of Flores’s Falstaff, which was simply wonderful to watch. He was everything you need in a Falstaff, without actually being the size of Falstaff, which, as the knight himself points out, isn’t a particularly healthy size to be. Furthermore, with the exception of the one- or two-line characters, the (I hate to use the term) supporting cast brought out the nuance and importance of the dozens of the smaller roles (often noble people with valid grievances). I long to see them in the camp scene in Henry V.
It’s noteworthy that they’re using the Play On! scripts, rather than the actual Shakespearian text. For those unfamiliar (the series is officially titled Play On! 36 playwrights translate Shakespeare) is an ambitious effort commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival to update Shakespeare into more modern English, while maintaining what makes the plays special. Accomplished playwrights and poets translated the scripts to be more accessible to today’s audiences. Now before you have the same knee-jerk reaction I had at first, allow me to elaborate.
First, while each playwright handled the task differently (from the five plays I’ve become familiar with), they strove to keep as much of the original format as possible—the mix of prose and verse and wording. The most significant changes are to the jokes and references: there are things that Elizabethans readily knew, and that we just don’t understand without explanatory footnotes (difficult to read during a performance). For me, this made the back-and-forths between Hal and Falstaff much more enjoyable, since their exchanges were actually funny. Moreover, the pronunciation of many words has changed over 400 years; puns that once worked no longer do. More controversially, you’ll see that some of the adaptors have jettisoned the thees and thous, while others kept them.
Second, outside of a classroom setting, how many of us read Chaucer in the original today? I don’t. When I read Thucydides, I don’t use the Thomas Hobbes’ 1628 translation; I use Rex Warner’s from the 1960s. My point being that there’s nothing inherently wrong with the idea of adapting/translating Shakespeare’s plays to make them more accessible. Would I personally prefer the majesty of the original? Unquestionably. Does that mean I can’t enjoy these versions? Of course not.
So here’s to better weather for the second round. And while there’s a part of me that wishes Shakespeare Dallas had repeated the audacity of two years ago, when they performed the War of the Roses in a single day (all three parts of Henry VI and Richard III as edited by the great John Barton), it’s probably better to have broken them out across the weekend…if we get to see them all, that is.
WHEN: April 20-30
WHERE: Samuell-Grand Amphitheatre, 1500 Tenison Parkway, Dallas
