It is so rare for any company to stage Shakespeare’s “Henry VI” trilogy that one could honestly say that the National Asian American Theatre Company’s production is unlike any you’ve ever seen in New York before. That, anyway, is what I could say when in 2018, I first saw the company’s vividly performed six-hour version of these English history plays. But eight years later, I can’t say that anymore.
“NAATCO’s Henry VI: A Trilogy in Two Parts” is now being presented again, this time at the Public Theater. It is much the same ambitious undertaking; it hasn’t been changed much. Apparently, I’m the one who has changed, because I reacted with less excitement this time around. Perhaps I have aged out of an appetite for marathon theatergoing — or maybe it was just a mistake to revisit this marathon. (Is there any point in crossing out an experience on your bucket list twice?) In any case, I think the show deserves my tapping back into my initial youthful enthusiasm.
True, it is hard to deny the reason the “Henry VI” trilogy is rarely produced. These first three plays that Shakespeare wrote, when he was still in his twenties, “have prompted much more scholarship than admiration,” the late Harvard professor Herschel Baker wrote in an essay that tries to be kind: “For a young writer to undertake so big a subject as fifty years of English history required both skill and valor; and if the skill is sometimes lacking, the valor certifies his bold intention.”
But in a program note in the playbill, Public Theater artistic director Oskar Eustis offers a more positive spin. “How often do you get to see a Shakespearean masterpiece that feels like a new play”? he writes. It feels like a new play, he says, because, yes, it is so rarely produced, but also because its epic account of a superpower wracked by foreign wars and civil strife offers deep resonance in present-day America. “When you hear Jack Cade’s populist uprising, you can’t believe it was written over 400 years ago and isn’t a transcript of the January 6 uprising.”
Wisely, NAATCO has put together two relatively brief videos, available in the lobby, to orient the audience in advance, by providing historical context. And, this time around, the playbill includes a synopsis of all four Acts and lists the cast in order of first appearance – which makes it a little easier to distinguish among the scores of characters.
If, despite these aids, audience members still need a unusual level of attention and patience to discern the modern-day parallels (or just to follow what exactly is going on), director Stephen Brown-Fried’s production also offers more visceral pleasures. His adaptation condenses the three parts into two (with separate admissions), judiciously cutting in half what would have been a 12-hour running time. The design, by a different team, is minimalist and modernist now, but the movement directors are the same, and the battle scenes in particular are still stunningly staged.
It’s the 16 crackerjack cast members, eight of whom are reprising their roles from eight years ago, who do the heavy lifting in this English history lesson. It begins with the funeral of the triumphant warrior King Henry V, who conquered much of France, and presents a half-century of what Shakespeare saw as England’s disorder and decline under the well-meaning but ineffectual reign of Henry V’s son and successor.
Jon Norman Schneider shines as Henry VI, a weak but passionate monarch, though he gets surprisingly little stage time considering the play is named after his character.
Paul Juhn is the crafty Duke of Suffolk who convinces Henry to wed the French princess Margaret, portrayed with a flourish by Teresa Avia Lim. But the married Suffolk has an underhanded strategy, seeing Margaret as his personal plaything and his Trojan Horse:
Margaret shall now be queen, and rule the King; But I will rule both her, the King and realm.”
The torridness of Margaret and Suffolk’s affair, and Margaret’s conniving viciousness, don’t achieve full flower until Part 2. Indeed, those seeking out Game of Throne-like violent thrills will prefer Part 2, which is rife with scenes of torturing unto death. It’s also 15 minutes shorter than Part 1, and with less exposition. But skipping Part 1 will mean missing a subtle payoff in seeing Shakespeare’s take on Joan of Arc (here named Joan la Pucelle), which is decidedly less saintly than Shaw’s(quite the opposite), especially when performed by Myka Cue as an all-out warrior adept at both the martial arts and biting.
Rajesh Bose as Richard Plantagenet the Duke of York is one of several scheming antagonists who are appropriately magisterial. He is the leader of the white rose faction, bickering and battling with the red rose faction. Among the roles performed by the great Mia Katigbak is a thrillingly sly, nasty Richard, the same character who will go on to star in “Richard III,” another one of Shakespeare’s 10 history plays – and, like almost everything else Shakespeare wrote for the stage, far far more popular than “Henry VI,” parts one, two or three.
“Henry VI: A Trilogy in Two Parts” is on stage at the Public Theater through July 19.
