It’s a comfort to know that even Shakespeare wrote a few clunkers. The Henry VI plays—an English history deep-dive so detailed that he needed a trilogy to cover it—are three such lemons. Don’t get me wrong; nobody is a bigger Bard fan than I. But there’s a reason these three are so rarely performed—and even more rarely performed as originally written, Henry VI Part 1, Henry VI Part 2, and Henry VI Part 3.
The National Asian American Theatre Company and director Stephen Brown-Fried (who also made the judicious cuts to the text) have smartly condensed the three plays into two: Part 1: Foreign Wars and Part 2: Civil Strife. The total running time is still more than five and a half hours, but it’s a small price to pay for such an ambitious production.
If you saw Henry V—and if you’re here, chances are you did—you might remember the epilogue that alluded to Henry VI’s disastrous reign. Those Foreign Wars, FYI? Led by one Joan la Pucelle, aka Joan of Arc (a dynamite Kim Wong, who later plays a stalwart Buckingham and a steely Lady Grey). Everyone has guidance for the feckless Henry VI (Jon Norman Schneider): first his advisers, the Bishop-turned-Cardinal Beaufort (Wai Ching Ho) and the “lord protector” Duke of Gloucester (Mia Katigbak), then his wife, Margaret (Mahira Kakkar), who thought she was marrying a monarch but wound up with a mouse. (“Henry my lord is cold in great affairs/ Too full of foolish pity,” she sighs.) And when they’re not counseling Henry, you’d better believe they’re plotting to take his crown: Richard Plantagenet, the Duke of York (Rajesh Bose), thinks it’s rightfully his. (The scene where he explains his lineage to Warwick, played by Vanessa Kai, is so hilariously convoluted that even if we had a flow chart we wouldn’t be able to follow it.) Even once Henry is successfully pushed off the throne, the battle—or Civil Strife—has just begun. The Duke of York has what Margaret calls a “mess of sons”: “the wanton Edward” (David Shih), “the lusty George” (Paul Juhn), and “that valiant crook-back prodigy, Dicky” (an appropriately menacing David Huynh), who in a later play will contemplate giving his kingdom for a horse.
For me, the best part of these plays—which I’d never read, and hadn’t seen until last week—was the discovery of the mouthy Margaret, the ball-busting queen who’s one “screw your courage to the sticking-place” away from Lady Macbeth. And she goes into battle! Of course, someone has to; clearly, it’s not going to be her wishy-washy husband. (At one point, someone actually tells Henry to clear out: “The Queen hath best success when you are absent.”)
It’s also pretty fascinating to see Richard III before he turned into the murderous monster we all know and love to loathe. Though Brown-Fried trims nearly 20 lines from young Richard’s famous soliloquy—one of the longest in any of Shakespeare’s plays—it’s still more reflective and illuminating than anything he unloads in his eponymous tragedy: “Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile/ And cry ‘Content’ to that which grieves my heart/ And wet my cheeks with artificial tears/ And frame my face to all occasions.”
The text could have been cut a smidge more. The rebellion of Jack Cade (Ron Domingo), which sets the stage for the Duke of York’s uprising, and his band of rabble-rousers—a basket of deplorables if ever there was one—runs far too long, as does the rose-plucking scene that establishes the rift between Plantagenet and Somerset (Anna Ishida). The latter also fails to convey the pettiness of the fight—to quote Hamilton, “your father’s a scoundrel, and so, it seems, are you”—that will lead to years and years of bloodshed.
Now…who’s ready to pick up where the action leaves off with Richard III?
Henry VI–Part 1: Foreign Wars opened Aug. 21 and Henry VI–Part 2: Civil Strife opened Aug. 22; they run through Sept. 8 at A.R.T./New York Theatres. Tickets and information: naatco.org
