Shakespeareans can't shape up Hal's fat pals

MATT WIEGLE/YH

The first thing, and perhaps the last thing, you will notice at the Elm Shakespeare's free Edgerton Park production of Henry IV, Part I is a gigantic wooden door. It's the centerpiece of designer Jamie Burnett's set, and it's tremendously exciting.

When that door opens, though, something extraordinary has to be behind it. This year's production is worlds better than last year's Twelfth Night, yet there is a kind of hollowness that indicates that, despite its obvious civic virtue, the Company doesn't really know who its audience is. By trying to appeal to several imagined audiences at once—suburbanites from Hamden, Yale professors and students, people from the city of New Haven—Henry has difficulty finding a coherence that makes its action meaningful and its characters memorable.

Director James Andreassi, who also plays the major role of John Falstaff in the production, suggests in his notes that Henry is a tough sell because of its relative obscurity. Actually, it's a great idea for a public performance. Shakespeare's play is like the summer ego movies that Kevin Costner and Mel Gibson used to put together: love, death, sex, a lengthy battle scene, and enough period costumes to lend it all legitimacy. The plot is remarkably thin: Henry IV just lopped off the head of Richard II and took control of greater Britain, and the rebellious triad of Mortimer, Glendower, and Northumberland want a slice for themselves. Unfortunately, while Northumberland's son, Percy (a.k.a. Hotspur) is a dedicated and able warrior, Henry's own son, Hal Jr., is romping around with a "huge hill of flesh" named John Falstaff. Lots of political debate, grandstanding, and incomprehensible Welsh ensue, but the point is that Henry V needs to learn to be a good boy to win the day.

The current production is mixed. Although the audience Wednesday night laughed at some of the jokes and clapped at some of the love scenes, they spent much of the time in respectful silence. Some of the funniest scenes in Shakespeare—Falstaff's debauchery and ineptitude in Eastcheap with Prince Hal—go off without a single laugh, just as the battle scenes and heroic declaiming seem to drag on interminably. Most of this has to do with a sloppy interpretive strategy that seems to consists of little more than putting people in Renaissance dress and having them make a lot of noise.

Andreassi obviously made an attempt to make the play more "American" and less Merchant Ivory. Sometimes this means pandering to the groundlings with audience participation games, adding a song about "Mary's hairy thing" and what she does with it that would never have made it past the Lord Chamberlain, and using the Fargo soundtrack to moody excess.

More often, unfortunately, it means accents that veer from Southern drawl to highland brogue, often within the course of the same sentence. Although the worst offender in this regard is John Hadden's Henry IV, nearly everyone does it. Likewise, Kes Khemnu's Hotspur—probably the most consistent performer in the show—has been told to stutter whenever he tries to pronounce the letter "W," a character affectation that does not make up in laughs from the audience what it lacks in subtlety.

Andreassi also has trouble managing Burnett's enormous stage. Characters often stand absurdly far away from each other with their faces forward and arms akimbo, and deliver their lines as if they were shouting to a friend lost in the woods. The first hour or so is painful, particularly during the scenes with Henry and his advisors, the Earl of Westmoreland (Tom Murphy) and Sir Walter Blunt (Ray Massie). Either Hadden, Murphy, and Massie don't understand their lines, or, more likely, they don't know exactly for whom they are intended.

The production improves dramatically from Act III onward. There is a terrific battle sequence with lots of fog and well-choreographed sword fighting. The relationship between Hotspur and his wife, Kate (Lisa Bostnar), has a great deal of poignancy. Likewise, Hal's (Greg Derelian) and Falstaff's relationship takes on a resonance late in the play that it cannot gain at the beginning. Yet by then it might be too late. Hal's conversion from frat boy to rightful heir seems less truly inevitable and more just unconvincingly fast. And Andreassi's performance as Falstaff—the key to any successful production of Henry IV—is competent, but he develops neither the sympathy nor the scenery-chewing hamminess that he might. He occupies the stage; he does not command it.

One of the greatest strengths of Shakespeare's plays is that they exploit the uncertain boundaries between villain and friend, exposing the humanity of even the cruelest dictator—or the most indulgent lecher. Although there are several moments that match this potential in the Elm Company production, they are the exceptions in the midst of a continuing struggle to find a workable direction and a coherent audience. In the end, the supreme irony might be that an actor-director playing the greatest glutton in history has bitten off more than he can chew.

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