Henry IV, Part One: Much Humor, Less Horror

Of all of Shakespeare's histories, I like the two Henry IV plays the best, for their jarring combination of ribald humor and bloody horror. Over the last few years, I have appreciated them even more for their uncanny parallels to present political realities. Here we see a world leader's son spending his youth in debauchery, then turning about-face to assume his father's mantle, self-righteous in his sense of destiny. Here we see soldiers dying in a war that should never have happened, its perpetrator deceived and manipulated by his advisers. Here we see ordinary people, in taverns where they drink and in battlefields where they die, sacrificing their own destinies for another man's. And here we see the occasional extraordinary old drunk who speaks the truth better than a ruler or a Rumsfeld: "What is honor? A word."

These parallels are not lost on director Marc Silberschatz, whose troupe, Twenty Feet Productions, is presenting in repertory the eight plays that ponder the devastating Wars of the Roses between the houses of Lancaster and York in 14th- and 15th-century Britain and France. The cycle, Silberschatz says, shows how "a diseased morality acts on a people like a cancer." Retelling this story "gives us a chance to examine what we are doing today" in our own domestic and international affairs.

Whether this marathon makes the present-day connection is best evaluated by those who, like the 12 actors themselves, had the stamina to take in the entire experience. With only two plays to go on, I can report that Richard II, reviewed elsewhere on this site, effectively portrays the diseased morality that initiated nearly a hundred years of bloodshed. The actors do not have to use neckties or cigars to demonstrate how easily a vain and cocksure leader can be toppled by cunning and venal opponents. The subsequent play, Henry IV Part One, is rocky and rushed, though the effects of the growing cancer remain clear.

The secret of a good Henry IV is in maintaining a perfect balance between the comic and the tragic, but in this production the comic wins hands down.

Richard Brundage commands the stage as literature's most lovable philosopher-drunk, Sir John Falstaff. In Richard II, Brundage plays the dominating Duke of York with incongruous timidity, but here you get a real Falstaff, savoring each juicy line like an epicure tasting wine, rolling the words delightedly around the tongue with deliberate pace and timing, moving and gesturing effortlessly.

Alas, he has an inadequate match in Albert Aeed as Prince Hal, the king's heir. Admittedly, this is a difficult role for any actor

Richard II: The Journey Begins

It is almost impossible to comprehend what has been happening at the West Park Presbyterian Church on Amsterdam Avenue at 86th Street this month. The entire eight-play Wars of the Roses cycle of Shakespeare's histories (Richard II, Henry IV Parts One and Two, Henry V, Henry VI Parts One, Two, and Three, and Richard III), cut minimally, is being performed in repertory six days a week, with three plays on Saturdays, through March 4. And 12 actors do it all.

This sweeping project comes from twentysomething Marc Silberschatz, who founded the company, Twenty Feet Productions, just two years ago and last season cut his teeth on the two parts of Henry IV in collaboration with the York Shakespeare Company. In addition to directing all the plays, he assumes the title role in the Henry VI trilogy, plays subordinate roles in the other plays, handles publicity, and sometimes sells tickets at the door. Total budget: $8,000.

One immediately thinks all this cannot possibly be good. It is hard enough to mount one respectable production with twice as many players and a hundred times the budget. But judging from Richard II, the one play I have seen thus far, the results are quite astounding. The reason is that this mammoth effort runs on the power of the plays themselves and on the passion and perspicacity of the actors presenting them.

There are no sets; the church is set enough, with its spacious sanctuary, elevated and carved-wood preaching area, and balcony. The lighting is basically off-and-on. The costumes range from thrift-shop to clothes-closet. No pyrotechnics, no revolving stages, no pheromonal attractants, no haute couture. But who needs all that folderol anyway, those strained attempts to contemporize, contextualize, distract, disguise? It is the words, and the knowing movement around the words, that make Shakespeare work. And it works here.

The actors, mostly young, are unpaid. They rehearsed all eight plays together as a unit, four to five hours a day, five days a week, for four months. Each actor plays 20 or more parts in the cycle, and when the same character appears in succeeding plays, the actor retains the role throughout.

Oh yes, and one more thing: the casting is gender-neutral. Among the major figures, for example, King Henry IV is played by a woman, Queen Margaret of Anjou by a man.

Richard II is a good place for the theatergoer to start this remarkable journey, both because its subject is the king whose vanity and avarice precipitated the devastating hundred-year Wars of the Roses between the related houses of Lancaster and York that the eight plays encompass, and because it is the most poetically pure of the cycle. With no big battle scenes, no comic relief, and written entirely in verse, it challenges the actors to bring the characters alive by virtue of their interpretation of the text alone. And by and large, they do it.

Seth Duerr, an experienced Shakespearean, commanding in stature and physically expressive, plays King Richard forcefully, if perhaps too cautiously. The precipitous crumbling of a seemingly invincible personality calls for a turnaround much more drastic than he offers.

Bending gender, Kymberly Tuttle is cast in the crucial role of Henry Bolingbroke, who deposes his cousin Richard and takes the crown for himself as Henry IV. Steely, sober, calculating, brutal, Tuttle portrays him rightly. However, she's over a head shorter than her rival, with short blond hair and a face to die for, and dressed in form-fitting black to boot. She thus challenges the willing suspension of one's disbelief. Yet there is something convincing about her, and only later did I realize what it is: she bears a certain resemblance to...Hillary Clinton. This may work after all.

Of the three other women taking men's roles, Nicole Maggi as Henry Percy the Elder affords a dash more belief. She's built tough, looks tough, and acts tough, like an NYPD cop. But even her best efforts at masculinity are sometimes thwarted in competition with the bushy-bearded and impetuous Ryan Patrick Ervin as Percy's up-and-coming son Hotspur.

Kristin Woodburn

So, What is a Coolidge Dollar?

"You're the top! You're an Arrow collar! / You're the top! You're a Coolidge dollar!" What the heck is an Arrow collar?

With a basic education in U.S. history, you can take a stab at Coolidge dollar, but you would have to be a fashion historian, or 90 years old, to know what an Arrow collar is.

Legendary composer and songwriter, Cole Porter, encapsulated the popular culture of his time. Take a song like "You're the Top," and you can identify exactly what this country was obsessed with in 1934: everything from the marvels of science and advertising ("You're cellophane; you're Pepsodent") to public works ("You're the Dam at Boulder; you're the National Gallery"), with politicians and pop stars thrown in between. By all rights, songs like this one should now be quaint anachronisms, but they still sound so fresh today you get right into them, even if you do not know what they mean.

To hear Cole Porter performed both live and lively is reason enough to go see Anything Goes, a production of the Heights Players, the oldest theater company in Brooklyn. For nearly 50 years, this company of local talent has offered eclectic and challenging seasons of works ranging from fervent to farce, in a little theater in the half-round with actors and audience almost cheek-to-jowl. The challenge for the troupe this time was to take a musical whose book is a less-than-quaint anachronism and make it entertaining enough to tolerate while waiting for the next immortal song. And they actually pull it off.

The story, a Gilbert-and-Sullivan-type shipboard contrivance of disguises and wrong matches made right at the end, is just a fluffy little platform for a collection of Porter at his best, songs that, by now, need no platform at all. People may have found such devices amusing in 1934, but it is hard to do so now. The dialogue is barely witty, the characters flat, and the plot stereotypical. All the more challenge for a director to overcome these handicaps, and Steve Velardi has done an admirable job.

Given the restrictions of the original book by Guy Bolton, PG Wodehouse, Howard Lindsay, and Russel Crouse, the acting was admirable too. Erika White as the blowsy, boozing singer Reno Sweeney - the part played by Ethel Merman in the 1934 Broadway production and subsequent 1936 movie - gives a gutsy if not lusty performance and belts out a good tune. Her fellow lead, Zachary Scott Abramowitz as the ingenuous but resourceful Wall Street lackey Billy Crocker, is not able to rise above the insipidity of the script and does not have the vocal range or power to do justice to Porter's romantic masterpieces "Easy to Love" and "All Through the Night."

Alea Vorillas as Billy's true love Hope Harcourt, sings touchingly but acts blandly, while Raymond Adams as her fianc