Carl Cofield, Director

Henry IV, Part One is a louder world; the war is more explosive, more in your face. Henry IV, Part Two is a quieter world; the wars are still there, but they’re internal. So we get to see these characters’ trajectories go from the glory and exuberance of Part One to the more solemn, contained, introspective world in Part Two.

That is one of the things that intrigues me about Part Two—finding these characters in constant upheaval and internal battles and how they navigate them. Being in the Thomas Theatre feels like the right space for an audience to sit and watch these characters churn over these life decisions and how they manage these conflicts. One of the big things to notice in Part Two is that the mural on the back wall has been completed. So we’ve moved on a little bit. The world is starting to come into focus.

Dede Ayite is again the costume designer for Part Two, and the way we likened the difference between the two shows is like this: if Part One is “You go out to the club and you’ve had two drinks and feel buzzed, and you feel oddly attracted to someone,” Part Two is “It’s now 4 a.m., you’ve had seven drinks and the light is starting to come up, and you realize that’s not the person you were looking at; his hair is gone, or he’s missing certain things in his mouth that should be there.” So it’s a different look on the world, and the clothes will reflect that. The times are tough. The king is sick. And I don’t think we can escape that. The air is different. The land is sick. It’s a civil war. So to my thinking, there’s blood in the soil, and that makes the food taste different. That makes the clothes wear differently.

Elisheba Ittoop, Sound Designer and Composer

Part One is the club, it’s Drake, it’s fun, it’s sparkly, anything can happen. Part Two is the blues. It’s this idea of singing through the pain. It’s like smeared makeup at the end of the night. And who encapsulates the smeared-makeup sound to me? It’s Amy Winehouse. So I’ve written a couple of songs for Mistress Quickly in the show, and they have a kind of Amy Winehouse-with-a-Dap-Kings feel. Amy sang the blues, when you get down to it; the Dap-Kings added this extra amazing layer to it, it’s like the very forward-driving, masculine beat.

Rebecca Clark Carey, Voice and Text Director

I’ve been trying to put my finger on why I really love this play. And today, Dan Molina [who plays Prince Hal in both of the Henry plays] shared something that a patron had said to him, which is that Henry IV, Part One is in a major key and Part Two is in a minor key. I thought that was very astute. And I’m a minor-key kind of gal. It’s also often described as being an autumnal play, filled with bounty and with rot, with beauty and with sadness. Autumn is my favorite season, and I think those qualities all appeal to me.

But on reflection, I think what I really love about it is that I find it to be one of the most poetic of Shakespeare’s plays. Which may be a surprising assertion, because a lot of it is in prose, and it doesn’t have those famous, incredibly dense passages. To me, poetry is language that is constructed deliberately and primarily to cut clean through to the bone, to tell the unspeakable truths of our hearts. It tells us the truth we’re inevitably too distracted to tell ourselves. And as such, poetry can be and often is very simple. It can be bawdy, it can be funny, it can be sad, it can be extravagant, stirring, chilling, intoxicating, infuriating, comforting, exhilarating and excruciating. It is very often excruciating.

From this play, Northumberland, on learning of [his daughter] Hotspur’s death, says, “Let heaven kiss earth. Now let not nature’s hand keep the wild flood confined. Let order die.”

And Hal as Henry V to Falstaff: “I know thee not, old man.” It’s excruciating, and it’s poetry. I used to teach at the drama school in London where we used a lot of poetry in training the actors. I asked one of the old sages there about it once, and he said it’s because poetry is the greatest discipline for an actor, because what it requires of you is that you stand up straight and mean what you say. It’s the most exposing, vulnerable, exquisite, courageous thing a person can do: to stand and speak poetry.

Lydia Garcia, Dramaturg

Much of what we’ll encounter in this world will feel familiar from Part One. We’re still working through some of the same themes that Shakespeare is grappling with: the nature of kingship, the anxiety of succession, the legitimate transfer of power. We’re talking about the uneasy intersection of political pressures and family relationships, the push and pull between Hal and all of the father figures in his life. We’re talking about the growing presence of illness, of decay and disease—first in the mortal bodies of Falstaff and the king, and by extension, in the body politic of a country gripped by civil rebellion. We’re talking about the inexorable pull of time, both looking forward to the future and also glancing back to memories of the past. And we are still talking about the struggle of upholding norms of honor and order and the havoc of pell-mell war. So we have a lot to talk about with this play and where it falls in Shakespeare’s life, in his canon.

Amrita Ramanan, Dramaturg

This piece was written by Shakespeare in the mid-to-late-1500s, and within that time sequence there was a constant swirl about history for Shakespeare’s audience. Part One was incredibly popular, and so was Part Two; Shakespeare had a lot to live up to. And as a result, Part Two was actually advertised not only as Henry IV, Part Two, but “Henry IV, Part Two, continuing to his death and the coronation of Henry V, with the humors of Sir John Falstaff and the swaggering pestle.” So we got all of that together. What I think is so special about this piece is that it has both an expansion of the world and a compression of time. Shakespeare was able to take 10 years of history and put it into one play. And within that play, you see this intimacy, this point of internal conflict for so many of the characters, as well as these major events of dramatic action: the death of the king, the coronation of a new king, the resistance or betrayal of father figures. With the expansion, we have 48 characters in Part Two for this brilliant ensemble to portray. So we get to see the world in so many different ways. Something I really wanted to echo is, we start this piece like any great political tragedy, with lies and misinformation, and then it leads us to a place of examining the politics of this world. How does civil war transform to talk of invasion into France? How do we get to a place of considering who we are and how we respond to the world around us, and ultimately how does that then lead us to Henry V?

Alan Armstrong, Research Dramaturg

I was thinking back to last July when all of us met in New York City with Lileana Blain-Cruz, director of Henry IV, Part One, to start talking about these plays. I have to say, we did not know how resonant and timely these two plays were going to be now. So one point I want to make is true of all of Shakespeare’s history plays to a certain extent, but none more than of this particular one, Henry IV, Part Two. It’s as if Shakespeare held a tape recorder up to the whole nation. It has the voices of all the people, or as nearly all the people that make up the country as could be represented. And we’re very aware now that when people say “the people”—“let’s give back the monument to the people”—we really mean people like us, or people who think as we do. And one of the great things about Henry IV, Part Two is it’s not just one slice of people that we get to see in this play but everybody who is affected by these nation-changing and nation-building events. It’s all in there and with a kind of wholeness about the way in which those people are represented, too. That’s why I love this play. 

Henry IV, Part One runs in the Thomas Theatre through October 28. Buy tickets here. Henry IV, Part Two runs in the Thomas Theatre through October 29. Buy tickets here. The story will continue next season with Henry V, which will also run in the Thomas and feature many of the same actors. Henry V runs February 21 through October 27, 2018. Member Presale runs November 8—December 11.