Rites of succession Trinity Rep unleashes the Henriad BY CAROLYN CLAY
	The Henriad By William Shakespeare. Richard II, directed by Kevin Moriarty. Henry IV, directed by Amanda Dehnert. Henry V, directed by Oskar Eustis. Set by Michael McGarty. Costumes by William Lane. Lighting by John Ambrosone. Sound by Peter Sasha Hurowitz. Fight choreography by Craig Handel. With Brian McEleney, Timothy Crowe, Stephen Thorne, Fred Sullivan Jr., Angela Brazil, Anne Scurria, Rachael Warren, Barbara Meek, David Hanbury, Noah Brody, Joanna Cole, Ben Steinfeld, Drew Battles, William Damkoehler, Mauro Hantman, and Miriam Silverman. At Trinity Repertory Company through December 19.

"Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown," and in Shakespeare’s Henriad, the troubled noggin is a Hydra-headed thing. The second and better written (though, time-wise, earlier) of the Bard’s tetralogies, the cycle encompasses Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, and Henry V and English history from 1398 to 1420. In perhaps its most ambitious undertaking ever, Trinity Repertory Company presents the works in three-production repertory (the two parts of Henry IV having been conflated), in what artistic director Oskar Eustis asserts is only the second such outing in America. In discussion for five years, its evolving meditation on leadership timed to this bitter election year, the Henriad is certainly an event — a rare opportunity to experience the sweep of the poetic, murderous, faith-driven national soap opera that is Shakespeare’s histories. And at Trinity, where three different directors sit and spur the plays, it’s the galloping ensemble of actors that holds its own reins. There are times in Henry IV when you want to cry, "Whoa." But by and large, this is a thunderous eight-and-a-half-hour relay ride you don’t want to miss.

Performed by a scrappy company that runs the gamut from 35-year Trinity vets to third-year acting students in the Brown University/Trinity Rep Consortium, many of them in half a dozen roles, the epic unfolds in the theater’s smaller and more intimate space — stripped down to blotchy brick and concrete — on a thrust stage of erupting boards one might term "this wooden trapezoid," with several rough staircases leading to an overhead bridge. Between the stage and three doors in the back wall is a pit into which, in fits of temper and some bruising if stylized combat, chairs and bodies are lobbed. At the human heart of the plays are deposed King Richard’s painful journey from profligate demigod to introspective human being and Henry V’s climb from Falstaff’s tavern to his father’s shoes. But taken together, the plays — and these productions, rife with religious, literary, and musical allusion — make clear the evolution of the English monarchy, in relation to its citizenry, from so-called divine right to ostensibly God-guided nation building.

One might expect, given the Biblical underpinnings, that the first would be last. But though each of these brimming productions has much to recommend it, Kevin Moriarty’s staging of the lyrical Richard II, here set around a subterranean pool of blood bridged by a rugged wooden cross, is the most affecting. Amanda Dehnert makes a roistering barnstorm of Henry IV, cutting much of Part 2 (Justice Shallow goodbye) and having the entire company on stage driving the action via barked Brechtian placards, even sitting to enjoy the vigorous proceedings. This production’s recurring musical motif, which connects it to both Richard II and Henry V, is an a cappella hymn setting of William Blake’s "And did those feet in ancient time" (from the preface to Milton), which concludes, "I will not cease from mental fight,/Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,/Till we have built Jerusalem/In England’s green and pleasant land." Eustis lays on a cooler hand, offering a pointed modern-dress rendering of Henry V in which a sincere, if questionably counseled, Harry memorably rallies his troops to a dubiously justified war he believes God has ordained. Although the director doesn’t wholly dim the magic of "A little touch of Harry in the night," Eustis, viewing the play in the damning shadow of Iraq rather than in the patriotic blaze of World War II, sees Henry V differently from the way Olivier did.

No one who saw director Moriarty’s brilliantly freewheeling contemporary adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor will be surprised to hear he takes a few liberties with Richard II, telescoping the quarrel between Thomas Mowbray and Henry Bolingbroke that leads to the banishment of both and bringing on stage the corpse of the murdered Gloucester to make it clear that Richard directed his uncle’s demise. He allows Anne Scurria’s moribund John of Gaunt, sinking to his knees, to belabor the play’s most famous speech not spoken by the king, the rapturous yet cautionary "This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle . . . "

But the simple, roughhewn production, given a cathedral feel by strategically placed a cappella motets (and the "Laudamus te" from Vivaldi’s Gloria), moves fleetingly, despite the script’s preponderance of reflective poetry over action. Neither does it browbeat its Christian imagery — though, in a bold climax, the deposed king, pierced in the side before his throat is cut, slowly tumbles Christ-like from his upper-level cell into a purgative bath of blood. For all the intercession of political alliance and betrayal, the emphasis here is on Brian McEleney’s preening and peremptory Richard, whose greatest fault may be an absolute belief in the Teflon quality of his divine right. McEleney brings to the part a smug yet beatific presence and a metallic and fluted, slightly mocking delivery that sits well on Richard’s back-and-forth of arrogance and self-dramatizing prostration and especially on the bereft ex-monarch’s contemplation "of graves, of worms and epitaphs" and "sad stories of the death of kings."

Little face is given to the weak "flatterers" who hover behind the throne, but there is sturdy work by William Damkoehler as the Earl of Northumberland, chief advocate for the wronged yet usurping Bolingbroke. Angela Brazil is touching as Richard’s queen, from whom, no homosexual here, he is tenderly parted. There is a tad too much Falstaff-to-come in Fred Sullivan’s allegiance-torn Duke of York. But Timothy Crowe brings a well spoken if too-grizzled virility to Bolingbroke that will stead him well as the world-weary, guilt-ridden, son-vexed political animal of Henry IV.

The noise and energy levels are ratcheted up when Dehnert takes the helm, sailing, as is her modus operandi, adventurously if over the top. There is more clanging of bells and stomping of boots in her raucous, angry Henry IV than in Riverdance mixed into Chimes at Midnight. Dehnert’s conflation devotes two-thirds of its three hours to a neatly streamlined Part 1 and puts Part 2 in a vice that squeezes out all but the essential, duplicitous putdown of a second rebellion, some rowdy shenanigans and intimations of mortality in Eastcheap, and backsliding wastrel-hero-of-Shrewsbury Hal’s restoration to his dying, doubting father and cruel rejection of sack-swilling surrogate paterfamilias Falstaff. Even the insomniac title character’s paean to the burden of kingship is cut to its "uneasy lies the head" chase.

But when it comes to the ever-popular heart of Henry IV, the affectionately boisterous give-and-take between Falstaff and Prince Hal amid the rabble, gray-bearded, fat-suited Sullivan (in a green-quilted vest that makes him look like a Robin Hood balloon) and wiry boy-next-door Stephen Thorne can’t outdo each other enough in comic interplay. The tavern scene in which the pair one-up each other imitating Crowe’s Henry IV cadence in parody of the monarch’s anticipated interrogation of Hal is priceless (as is Hal’s phallic lampoon of the fiery Hotspur, to whom dad routinely and unfavorably compares him). Thorne also anticipates his own reform in wistful, prescient asides. And once he has thrown aside his ripped leather jacket for a long green military coat, he grows to fit it while Sullivan, cannily if ignobly, weighs in on "honor."

Although Mauro Hantman plays Hotspur on one note of unquellable hotheaded valor (perhaps that’s written into the part), the athletic tabletop skirmishes at Shrewsbury culminate in a head-bashing encounter between him and Hal that is as brutal as it is heartbreaking. In general, the fight choreography by Craig Handel is first-rate, and the physical exertions of the ensemble, leaping tables as if they were stepping stools, swinging from the catwalk supports, tumbling like sword fodder off the back of the stage, bespeak as many Wheaties as late nights of line learning and long days of character hopping in their preparations.

By the time Eustis breaks out the suits and briefcases at the top of his crisp 20th-century Henry V, it’s a relief. Here McEleney’s Bible Belt politician of an Archbishop of Canterbury uses flow charts to explain the "clear as is the summer’s sun" convolutions of Salic law that supposedly justify the new king’s proposed invasion of France — a direct response to Henry IV’s deathbed advice "to busy giddy minds/With foreign quarrels, that action, hence borne out,/May waste the memory of the former days." Ghosts of both former monarchs and dead Falstaff come back to guide Thorne’s King Henry V as he battles the condescending French and his own bad-boy image. This helps connect the plays, though Eustis’s production is less rambunctious than Dehnert’s and replaces its vivid if symbolic violence with impassively delivered shots to the head.

Henry V, with its rallying invocation of "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers" and its seemingly providential 1415 victory at Agincourt, is an unabashedly patriotic piece. And Thorne’s brave, boyish Harry is an indisputable hero, albeit a human one who having ordered the pilfering Bardolph (McEleney as a sunny simpleton) executed weeps over the clownish corpse. At the same time, Eustis means to show the horror of businesslike war and raise a modern eyebrow at the invading Harry’s insistence that God is on his side. Although humbler than Richard II in his view of himself as the Deity’s "deputy anointed" and altogether more eloquent than Dubya, Harry is a more troubling figure by today’s light than he was in Shakespeare’s time.

Thorne is an intelligent, appealing actor, even if he lacks the sheer virtuosity to take his Hal from Eastcheap to Shrewsbury to Jerusalem to Agincourt; he’s a mercurial, complex Hal whose earnest transition to Henry V lacks some of that "Muse of fire" invoked by the play’s Chorus. But if this Henry V and its Henry V do not ignite like a recruiting poster, that may be Eustis’s intent. As for Trinity’s ambitious Henriad, it burns steadily, with a director-adjustable flame.