The royal treatment Trinity stages The Henriad:Shakespeare’s Kings BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Trinity audiences have had great times with Shakespeare on the boards. The company did a gripping Othello five years ago, though more typical was last season’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, a play at which thou couldst have more fun than a barrel of groundlings. Archaic diction is nothing for subscribers — many of whom were Shakespeare-trained by the theater’s Project Discovery back in high school, after all.

Yet artistic director Oskar Eustis could not be accused of forgetting for long that sometimes theatergoers just wanna have fun. Middle-brow musicals have brought ever-widening smiles to town over the course of Eustis’s 10 years here.

So it seems venturesome, if not risky, to try to pull off a Shakespearean trifecta at Trinity Repertory Company. The three plays (four, actually) comprising The Henriad: Shakespeare’s Kings may have Fred Sullivan reprising his Merry Wives role as the loveable rascal Falstaff, but these are history plays, requiring genealogy charts, not fat suits.

Actually, you can tell the royal players without a scorecard, since there aren’t many. In Richard II, directed by Kevin Moriarty, the erratic Richard (Brian McEleney) banishes his cousin Bolingbroke (Timothy Crowe), who becomes the monarch Henry IV. The six hours-plus of Henry IV Part I and Part II have been condensed to less than three by director Amanda Dehnert, who is focusing tightly on the motivations and character dynamics of Henry. In that play, the king’s juvenile delinquent son Prince Hal (Stephen Thorne), under the twisted tutelage of the thievish Falstaff, prepares to assume the throne. The concluding play, Henry V, directed by Eustis, shows the young king’s growth under pressure and leads up to the greatest military victory in English history, at Agincourt. (The newly introduced longbow saves the day against overwhelming French numbers, though Shakespeare doesn’t even mention the weapon’s role.)

That the ambitious Henriad would come to Providence probably was inevitable. Eustis has been preparing us for a long time for the marathon in the intimate downstairs theater. The first play he directed at Trinity — in 1990, long before he was hired here — was Julius Caesar.

Before a rehearsal, Eustis spoke in his office about the production.

Q: Election season, wartime issues, political dynasties — so all these aspects on and off the stage came together to make this inevitable? You had to do it?

A: I think so. There had to be some reason. We’d been looking at this material for well over five years now, ever since the summer of ’99 — we spent a summer over at Breadloaf working on The Henriad. So it’s been just waiting for a long time, and our affection for the material and our curiosity and interest in the material is deep. But the thing that finally made me say we’re going to solve the logistical problems of doing it now or never was the election.

Q: Brave. None of Shakespeare’s history plays, even the ones with Falstaff, have the jolly immediacy of one song from Ain’t Misbehavin’. What makes you confident that the Trinity audience is ready for this marathon, that it won’t be a box office disaster?

A: The short answer is: nothing. Because who knows what will happen? That’s the great thing about theater. The thing that I rest with some degree of assurance on is that Shakespeare’s the greatest writer in the English language that the world has ever known. These are three of his greatest plays — actually, four of his greatest plays turned into three. Very different from one another but inextricably linked. And our audience has actually always shown — certainly since I’ve been here — a real appetite for Shakespeare. Every time we’ve done Shakespeare, it has sold very, very well.

Q: Of the three, why did you choose Henry V for yourself?

A: Because it’s always been for me the most difficult and problematic of the plays. All the critical history for centuries talks about this — it’s a play that clearly on one level is about patriotic celebration and a legendarily successful king. And yet on the other hand it’s full of contradictions and darkness and difficulty that is not necessarily resting right on the surface of the play but is unmistakable as you look at it . . . .

So it’s a play that is one thing on the surface — a celebration — and is many other things as you spend any time looking at it. And that has irritated me and fascinated me about Henry V for 20 years.

Q: This ambitious production is drawing from longtime company actors performing in repertory. But for the last couple of years, you’ve been segueing the company from relying on X number of performances a year. What led to that decision?

A: I would say not so much trying to segue them out of relying on Trinity for X number of productions, because overall I think individual company members are going to be working as much as they’ve ever worked. What I’m trying to do is a couple of things. The first is to create a situation where people know what their work is and when it is, enough in advance that they can actually take some responsibility for planning their own professional lives. And I think that one of the disadvantages of the way we’ve operated recently was that our planning was so late, that in order to be a company member at Trinity you had to sort of accept that you would be waiting around and seeing if you were working.

Q: So you’re locking seasons in earlier.

A: Last May everybody got a letter that told them what they were doing for the next 12 months. And that to me is the essential idea of what the change was. And the other is also just to recognize that — not just in terms of size but in terms of aspiration — that company membership has to value continuity and at the same time recognize that change is a good thing. And so that being a member of the company is not the same thing as being a lifetime member of the company. It’s being a member of the company and saying that is something that potentially could go on for a very long time, for your working life, and potentially not — just like the rest of life.

And I think that’s really no different than it’s ever been. But it’s trying to formalize that and make that clear in a way that allows the company to transform. One of the demands that I think that the theater has on itself is to diversify the company racially. And I think that’s something we just have to do if we’re going to be the theater that we say we want to be, that we say we want to become. The only way to do that is if there’s some ability for the company to change. That’s what I’ve tried to set up.

And I don’t think that’s so much a dramatic change in policy as simply trying to formalize and speak out loud and plan for something that has always sort of happened haphazardly and individually and chaotically anyway. This has never been a lifetime job guarantee for anybody, but it sort of slides into a situation where people start thinking about it that way or thinking it might be that. And that’s, I think, unhealthy.

The Henriad runs through December 19 at Trinity Rep, 201 Washington Street, Providence. Call (401) 351-4242.