In 1935, the Old Globe opened in Balboa Park, presenting abridged versions of William Shakespeare’s plays at the California Pacific International Exposition. Today, the Globe is one of the largest nonprofit theaters in America and Shakespeare’s works are still presented each summer on its outdoor festival stage.
Over the past 89 years, the Globe has produced well over 100 Shakespeare productions — but it has never produced all of the Bard’s 38 plays. Now, after seven years of planning, fundraising, writing, educational programs and rehearsals, the Old Globe will finally complete the Shakespeare canon this summer with its first ever production of the “Henry VI” plays.
Old Globe artistic director Barry Edelstein has written a world premiere adaptation that condenses the three “Henry VI” plays into a pair of two-act plays that will run June 30 through Sept. 15 in the Globe’s outdoor Lowell Davies Festival Theatre. Edelstein is directing a company of 30 actors — including Broadway veterans William DeMeritt, Elizabeth A. Davis, Ian Lassiter and Tally Sessions — who will perform in rotating repertory of “Henry 6, Part 1: Flowers and France” and “Henry 6, Part 2: “Riot and Reckoning.”
As part of this production, the Globe is in the midst of a yearlong community engagement program that will involve nearly 1,000 San Diegans, both onstage and behind the scenes by mid-July.
The Henry 6 project has been a dream for Edelstein since he joined the Globe in 2012. He says it will not only be the biggest thing he’s ever done, it’s also the biggest Shakespeare production in Old Globe history.
The Henry saga
The Henry 6 project puts the Old Globe in rare company. Edelstein said he believes just 10 other U.S. theaters have produced all of Shakespeare’s plays, including Pasadena Playhouse.
Shakespeare’s popular “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Romeo and Juliet” and “Hamlet” pop up on multiple U.S. stages every year, but the Henry VI plays are almost never produced. Why? The three plays tell one continuous story about the long and turbulent reign of a 15th-century English king, so producing just one makes no sense and producing all three is too expensive.
Historians and critics also say the Henry VI plays, believed to be among Shakespeare’s earliest works, are poorly written. But Edelstein, who studied the plays while working on his doctorate in English Renaissance Drama at Oxford University in England, disagrees.
“‘Henry VI, Part I’ was the first play my tutor at Oxford assigned me to write about. I fell in love with it,” he said. “I’ve found that they’re unjustly overlooked. The writing is much better than even I, who knew them well, was willing to give them credit for. There are spectacular scenes in these plays that are right up there with the works of the later Shakespeare.”
“There’s an absolutely dazzling sense of energy about the plays that I’ve always loved,” Edelstein said, of Shakespeare’s youthful exuberance and experimentation. “Even if they rarely scale the heights of ‘King Lear,’ they’re consistently funny, scary and totally worth producing, even if they weren’t the neglected gems that they are.”
An audacious gift
The Henry VI plays were off the table at the Gobe until 2017, when Edelstein got a call from Tennessee philanthropist Roy Cockrum, a former monk who won the national Powerball in 2014 and has since dedicated much of his $259 million fortune to underwriting audacious, oversize productions that theaters could never afford to produce on their own.
Turns out Cockrum had attended an Old Globe production in 2015 and liked what he saw, so a few years later he phoned Edelstein and asked him: “Is there anything crazy you want to do?”
“He’s a visionary philanthropist who has seen something of merit in this project and decided to support it,” Edelstein said of Cockrum’s grant, the amount of which is undisclosed. “Without him, we couldn’t do it, and that’s just a fact. We’re hugely grateful to Roy for making this possible.”
From ‘Henry VI’ to Henry 6
With the funding in place in 2017, Edelstein spent the next two years pruning the three plays which have a combined 70,000 words and 175 characters.
First, Edelstein went through the plays line by line to trace a narrative thread that captures the essence of the king’s story while excising extraneous subplots and characters. Next, he used screenplay-writing software that allowed him to focus on the actions in each scene and then organized the scenes in an order that gives a theatrical arc to the story.
About 85 percent of the words in the adaptation are original to the plays. The rest Edelstein knitted together from other Shakespeare plays, some ersatz Shakespearean language or he told the story visually with invented stage business.
Shakespeare’s “Henry VI” plays fill the historical gap between his “Henry V” — with its famous “St Crispin’s Day” speech by the young warrior king, who led his outmatched English troops to victory over France — and “Richard III,” with its famously villainous king, who plots and murders his way to the throne.
The real King Henry VI was just a baby when his father, Henry V, died in 1422, so the government ruled in his stead until he came of age 15 years later. He would rule, off and on, for more than 40 years during which he was twice ousted from the throne by Edward IV, son of the Duke of York.
As depicted in Shakespeare’s plays, Henry was a weak king who lacked the battle lust and strategy of his father and was easily influenced by his strong-willed wife, Margaret of Anjou. The plays follow the continuous battle for power and the throne between Henry, his wife and England’s noblemen.
“There’s this idea in cosmology called the wheel of fortune,” Edelstein said. “History is a wheel that turns and somebody comes up and they’re on top and then they go down and somebody else comes up on top. Each of my four acts tells one of those stories where a new person rises and they fall.”
“During the writing process, I came to see that Shakespeare understands that when politics are divorced form values, the only possible outcome is violence. That’s the story that plays tell. Nobody other than this guy Talbot in the first play, including the king, has a larger vision of England. Everyone is only interested in their own power. Everything is about selfishness, murder, ambition, subtrefuge and plotting,” Edelstein said.
The ‘Experience’
Because these plays are unknown to San Diego’s theatergoing public, the Old Globe built a massive audience engagement program around the production called H6: The Experience. It’s a yearlong series of free behind-the-scenes programs and exhibits that the public has been invited to take part in to learn more about the Henry 6 project and the Globe itself.
Beginning last year and continuing through mid-September, the programs have include workshops to meet and interact with the show’s costume, sound and scenery designers, along with its composer, its movement director and its fight choreographer. There’s also a series of lectures, pre- and post-show events, and an exhibition opening June 30 the Globe’s history and the Henry 6 project on the Globe’s Copley Plaza.
Members of the public have also been invited to take part in the show itself. A group of 50 people took part in a choral workshop for a recorded soundscape that will be played each night. Another 250 costumed San Diegans were filmed saying lines for crowd scenes that will be projected onstage during performances. And 240 people are signed up to perform one of five brief walk-on roles at every performance.
Adena Varner, a Baltimore native who joined the Old Globe last year as director of arts engagement, said it has been a thrill bringing Edelstein’s ambitious vision for The Experience to life.
“By the time we get to the end of this run, it will truly be almost 1,000 San Diegans who will have participated in some way in the making of the show. I’ve done workshops, performances and community engagement in the past, but nothing like this where the mainstage work is integrated with the community,” Varner said. “It’s truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience. We’ve been throwing around this word ‘epic,’ but it feels authentic to the process.”
Varner said seeing the joy this project has brought to the everyday San Diegans participating in the Experience has been especially memorable.
“It’s been really evocative for people and I think, for us, quite humbling. It’s causing us to pause and consider how we produce Shakespeare moving forward because the outcome is real,” she said. “People feel like they belong. It has blown our minds. We have tapped into something really beautiful.”
Shakespeare’s words
On Jan. 7, a group of 30 San Diegans were invited to attend the first of two rehearsals of the play as part of The Experience. The invitees sat silently in rapt attention, leaned in to hear Edelstein’s words as he directed the actors and the audience enthusiastically clapped at the end of the scenes, which involved the Duke of York arriving at Henry’s court in hopes of seizing the crown, followed by a series of bloody street battles.
One of Edelstein’s chief goals at the Globe is to help people understand and better appreciate Shakespeare’s words. During the rehearsal he occasionally stopped the actors to explain the meaning behind their lines and put their words in a modern context. In explaining the bounty King Henry VI places on rebel Jack Cade’s head, Edelstein told the actors 1,000 crowns in Henry’s time would be the equivalent of $5 million today. He also offered quick character insights, describing York’s eldest son, Gloucester, as “a finance bro,” and Young Clifford as an “insane psycho ninja” determined to exact revenge for his father’s murder.
Seated among the audience was Barry Kohn, a retired San Diego accountant who admits that before the H6: The Experience he wasn’t much of a Shakespeare fan because he has trouble understanding the Elizabethan-era language. After attending two rehearsals earlier this month Kohn said he would probably buy tickets to the plays.
“I thought it was great,” said Kohn, who volunteers at the Globe as an usher and hopes to one day perform there onstage. “These are super professional actors at the top of their game. Barry gave nice helpful instructions on how to do things and say things better. It was a wonderful experience to see real professionals work.”
Edelstein said he’s been meeting a lot of people like Kohn who feel like they’ve suddenly discovered Shakespeare, even well into middle age. At a recent Shakespearean acting workshop he hosted for 45 people, a man walked up to Edelstein afterward to shake his hand and said: “I’m in the Navy. I fire missiles off ships at aircraft and I thought I’d come. I have no background in theater. Now all I want to read is go read more Shakespeare.”
“That has been a key theme of my decade-plus at the Globe, that theater can enhance your life in all kinds of surprising ways and it’s therefore incumbent on a nonprofit theater to make it part of our work, Edelstein said.
“It’s not just enough to put on a shiny show, you also have to make meaning in the community in all kinds of other ways,” he said. “People don’t seem to just want stories anymore. People want experiences. American theater is figuring out how do we create experiences for people that happen alongside or in addition to theater. How do we take what’s inside this institution and turn it outside.”
‘Henry 6’
When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Sundays. “One: Flowers and France” runs June 30 through Sept. 14. “Two: Riot and Reckoning” runs July 9 through Sept. 15. The two plays will run in repertory.
Where: Lowell Davies Festival Theatre, The Old Globe, 1363 Old Globe Way, Balboa Park, San Diego
Tickets: $35-$116. Separate tickets are required for each play.
H6: The Experience: For a schedule of upcoming engagement events, visit theoldglobe.org/arts-engagement/the-h6-epic-workshop-series
Info: (619) 234-5623
Online: theoldglobe.org