The Nervous Laughter Of '1 Henry IV'

Folger Highlights the Humor in Hal & Hotspur

"A funny surface over a troubled underbelly" is director Paul Mason Barnes's short summation of "Henry IV, Part I," Shakespeare's eventful, rollicking, eventually bloody history play. Barnes, producing director of the Great River Shakespeare Festival in Minnesota, has just staged it at the Folger Theatre, where it will run through Nov. 16 under the leaner British-style title "1 Henry IV."

Barnes and his actors portray Prince Hal (played by Tom Story), son of Henry IV (Rick Foucheux), as a young man determined to be jolly but quietly haunted by his kingly future. "Hal is very aware of his destiny," Barnes says, "and he's just trying to put it off as long as possible, before he is inevitably consumed by it, by that heir-apparent role."

Tom Story says he didn't quite buy Hal's first soliloquy. "It shows you a kind of politically manipulative person, and a kind of cold, calculating person," the actor says. But that wasn't how Story saw his character. "I was just interested in making him not a normal guy, but a guy who enjoyed having fun and playing jokes and having human contact and laughing," Story says. "I wanted him to laugh a lot, because I thought he probably didn't ever laugh at home . . . because it's coming. It's looming. And he's dancing as fast as he can to keep his responsibility at bay."

Some people told Story that the headstrong rebel leader Henry Percy, a.k.a. Hotspur, is the "sexy, fiery" role for a younger actor, while Hal is "thankless" part. Now that he's doing it, Story says, he finds that idea "shocking" because Hal has "such a huge journey." Hotspur and Falstaff are showier roles, he agrees. Hal is more internal. "Hal observes a lot in the play, and is trying to figure out what he's going to be," Story says.

"Hotspur is the more childish of the two, because he doesn't evolve into a politician," notes actor David Graham Jones, who plays him. "Hal becomes the quintessential politician. He sees both sides of things, whereas Hotspur sees what he wants to see. He sees the opportunities that are going to make him famous . . . but it's not a political thing. He's doomed to die, basically, because of that."

In the text, Jones adds, Hotspur is so incredibly rude to everyone, so blabby and monomaniacal about killing and the concept of honor in battle, that it's droll. "He's a very funny character, I think. The scenes with my father and my uncle, they're always telling me to shut up. . . . the jokes are written into the text, definitely, and I don't know why people don't play it like that."

Some portray Hotspur "as a brute almost," Jones notes, "and it's not very interesting." Nor did Barnes want "a Hotspur who was going to bash his way through the role," the director says: "I wanted to go for a Hotspur who is much more a John McEnroe type than an Arnold Schwarzenegger."

'Ethics and War'

With both of the area's religion-focused theater companies doing main-stage plays about ethics in wartime, they've decided to collaborate on staged readings to explore the subject further.

Theater J usually focuses on Jewish cultural or spiritual themes, but its latest production, "Honey Brown Eyes," is a stark drama by Stefanie Zadravec, about Muslims and Christians caught up in the Bosnian war of the early 1990s. It begins previews tonight and runs through Nov. 30.

Journeymen Theater Ensemble, which has a subtly Christian perspective, is staging the world premiere of "As American As" by Ken Prestininzi, associate chair/lecturer in playwriting at the Yale School of Drama. The darkly comic take on the "war on terror" going out of control on the home front runs tonight through Nov. 15 at Church Street Theater.

Under the umbrella title "Ethics and War," the readings will take place on consecutive Mondays (Oct. 27, Nov. 3 and Nov. 10) at 7:30 p.m. at Church Street Theater.

The idea for the series clicked when Artistic Directors Ari Roth of Theater J and Deborah Kirby of Journeymen met during the summer's Source Festival. Roth says he realized he'd found "a kindred theater company which has a foot in the world of spiritual exploration."