The Plantagenets go to war.

I went back to catch the first part of Henry IV at Actors' Shakespeare Project last weekend.  But I kind of wish I hadn't.  Their production of Part II at least had the difficulty of the play to excuse its gaps.  But despite Part I's relative vigor, the company still mostly went down for the count.  There were sparks here and there over the course of the evening - as there always are at ASP - but together they couldn't light a fire under this loud, but flat, production.

It was obvious why the show wasn't working - almost none of the emotional connections on which it depends were in place.  Hal and Falstaff seemed as distant as Hal and his father, Henry IV, so the whole prince-and-the-pauper contrast between license and responsibility (being in the tavern is fun; being at court, not so much) just wasn't happening; both options seemed like a drag.   It was pretty clear why Hal wasn't enjoying Falstaff's company, btw - this was the first Falstaff I've ever seen who didn't seem to be enjoying himself.  (So that wasn't happening.) And Hal didn't seem to like his other sidekick, Poins, much either  - and Poins returned the favor (and to be honest, so did we).  There was some rueful affection between Hotspur and Lady Percy, it's true - but Allyn Burrows is at least two decades too old for the role of Hotspur, and so the parallels between him and Prince Hal likewise never happened as they should (this Hotspur already seemed well-seasoned, and a better match to the crown than Barclay's Hal could ever be).  So I kept thinking, in scene after scene - "This just isn't happening."

Meanwhile the production seemed stuck in its historiography - adapter Robert Walsh (who also played Sir John) had appended to it scenes from Richard II which, I admit, gave some context to the conflicts embedded in the text - and particularly to the psychology of King Henry.  Still, the past-as-prologue stuff didn't seem to help things dramatically (undermining, perhaps, the conventional wisdom that it's the actual history that stands between modern audiences and these plays). Despite prompting from Richard II, Joel Colodner never convincingly connected the guilty dots regarding Henry's illegitimacy, and the rebel scenes, despite Burrows's solid work, and Steven Barkhimer's even-better turn as Glendower, didn't pull any extra oomph from the apparent legitimacy Walsh's additions seemed to provide them.

So how did this well-intentioned (and elaborate) effort go wrong?  Casting Walsh as Falstaff (and to a lesser extent, Barclay as Hal) probably is the root cause.  This oft-effective actor seemed to want to avoid all the usual clichés of this famous role; thus his was a reductive, not an expansive, Falstaff - a kind of wasted, misanthropic Vietnam vet (who, contrary to the text, still had some surly fight left in him) rather than  a jolly, mischievous glutton.  I suppose this counted as "interesting" in the rehearsal hall - and of course disillusionment (but not world-weariness) is key to the part.  But Walsh's perpetual, squinting hangover rarely got him anywhere on the actual stage, and it completely destroyed both the irony and the poignance of Shakespeare's grand arc: of course Hal would have to dump this loser, we knew from the start - and good riddance!  When Walsh intoned the famous line, "Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world!" all I could think was, "Uh - I don't think so."  Meanwhile director Patrick Swanson - who brought a great concept to bear on ASP's production of The Tempest - rarely shaped his scenes effectively, and the pace consistently dragged (until the war-drums began beating again, as they often did).

Sigh.  As Boston so rarely sees the history plays, it was disappointing to find this ambitious production such a misfire.  There was, as I mentioned, some good work around its edges.  Marya Lowry was a touchingly petulant Richard II, and Obehi Janice made a strong impression (as she usually does) in several smaller roles.  As noted, Barkhimer was wonderful as Glendower (as he had been as Justice Shallow in Part II; I longed to see him as Falstaff - he has the impish smarts).  Still, I think that ASP still refuses to realize that Shakespeare often depends not so much on individual performances as on a sense of ensemble - which, despite sharing, it seems, similar politics and ideas, these folks rarely manage to conjure.  The famous tavern scene threw this gap into sharp relief - despite some genuinely funny bits, it felt diffuse and out of focus (we'd never guess it's a turning point for Hal); looking around as it rambled through its course, you could see the individual actors immersed in their own performances ("What am I doing now?  How do I feel about this?") rather than contributing to group effects or responding to underlying themes.  This is, I admit, a persistent problem in American Shakespeare; assumptions left over from the heyday of the Method essentially short-circuit his symphonic intents.  But isn't it time the Actors' Shakespeare Project began to get beyond that?

Shakespeare's sequel

Shakespeare only wrote one real sequel - Henry IV, Part II, which may be the most difficult play in the canon to pull off. This is partly because the history of this history play is obscure to modern audiences (it follows the death throes of the rebellion that reached its climax in Henry IV, Part I).  But the drama is doubly problematic because it's so very much a sequel to a greater, more vigorous work. Part II follows the schema of Part I quite closely - sometimes scene by scene - yet offers a kind of dark variation on it.  Everything in Part II has declined from its state in Part I - Mistress Quickly's tavern is now a brothel, the king is almost bed-ridden, Hal's sour practical jokes barely come off, and even the rebellion is undone by trickery rather than bravery.  The tone of all this is brilliant - sometimes cynical in the mode of Jonson, but at other times elegiac in a manner that is uniquely Shakespeare's.   But when you ponder that Part I is also a thicket of complexity - it's a chronicle play and a coming-of-age tale, and yet also features a titanic character, Falstaff, who looms over everything in terms of theme but is only a bit player in the story - you realize that a melancholy variation on that plot can easily turn into a muddle.

Which explains why the play is almost never done as a stand-alone evening; it's generally presented in edited form, and interpolated with Part I, as Trinity did in a fairly-successful production a few years back.  (In fact, this is the first time I've seen Henry IV, Part II in its entirety in thirty years.)  Thus the Actors' Shakespeare Project has to be congratulated for its bravery in doing the whole darn thing, in repertory with Part I - indeed, more than the whole darn thing, as adapter Robert Walsh (who also plays Falstaff) has book-ended the production with a prologue from Part I and various bits of Henry V to give its arc more context.

Alas, I don't think he succeeded in doing that - nor was I impressed with his somewhat-flat Falstaff.  I was likewise a bit under-whelmed by Bill Barclay as his foil, Prince Hal; the two had little chemistry - and this is a huge failing in any production of Henry IV because it undermines the power of the play's conclusion (Hal's rejection of his former companion).  Still, Barclay had his moments on his own, and struck a few sparks with Joel Colodner, who probably did the production's best dramatic work as the failing Henry IV. Even he, however, missed the poetic dimension of his best speeches, and another key role - the Lord Chief Justice - was given to an actor, Jonathan Louis Dent, who has promise but nothing like the gravitas the part requires.  Perhaps the production still could have succeeded, given these gaps, if director Patrick Swanson had some strong conceptual gambit up his sleeve (as he had with this troupe's version of The Tempest), but apparently he just didn't (although there were a few moments, such as a slow trudge of wounded soldiers through one scene, that had the right kind of mood). And the  ASP's usual grab-bag of costumes and props only made the historical pageant aspect of the show seem even more scattered than it otherwise would.

Still, I was unable to catch Part I prior to Part II, and perhaps the performances of Walsh and Barclay, along with other decisions, will make more sense once I've seen the whole thing.  As it stands, this production does catch fire in its smaller performances (which generally align with Shakespeare's sharpest sketches).  There was strong work from Bobbie Steinbach as Mistress Quickly, and Allyn Burrows (the company's artistic director) made a hilariously gonzo Pistol, while Steve Barkhimer came up with a nicely addled Justice Shallow.  There were other good moments, in even smaller roles, from the reliable Obehi Janice and Michael Forden Walker.  The production could still come together, I think, and after I've seen the whole thing, I may offer some second thoughts.