“Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts.”

- Henry V

Shakespeare’s history plays sometimes get a bad rap as being intimidatingly remote: a confusing parade of Richards and Henrys, served up with endless political wrangling by English aristocrats over the crown. I get it. If it makes you feel any better, I will confess something to you: I really don’t think of Henry V as a history play at all. King Henry’s military campaign in France in 1415 (and his questionable reasons for launching it) may be the setting of the play, but it is not its primary subject.

For me, it’s a play about a company, about a group of people who are transformed from disparate individuals into a cohesive whole. It’s also about growing up, and the never-ending process of integrating all of your past selves in the person you are BECOMING today. It’s about leadership, and in particular the ability to use language to galvanize, and inspire, and transform. Finally, it’s about creativity and performance. INVENTION. Play. The life-affirming act of creating something out of nothing.

Ultimately, any truly great production of Henry V must also be about the relationship between the actors and You, the audience. It’s about the circle, the co-creation, the weaving-together that makes the theater so uniquely compelling as an art form. Take a moment to look up from reading this program note and have a look around the HVSF tent, transformed for this production into a theater-in-the-round. As King Henry says at one point in the play, “Wish not a man from England.” We are enough! More than enough, if we really bring all of ourselves and our imaginations to each other and to the story. Theater that involves the audience in the unfolding of the story is my favorite kind of theater, and it’s what we do best at HVSF.

I find great humor and irony and heart in this play, and I think we often read it far too earnestly. Though the play takes very seriously the terrible cost of war, it’s constantly switching tones from the high drama of politics into some other key – more personal, warmer, more ridiculous, more about the texture of human relationships. This makes sense given that the central figure of the play is a bit of a chameleon, and an expert performer. Henry is described as someone who “can drink with any tinker in their own language,” which I think means not just that he’s an expert code-switcher, but also that he understands that effective communication is not primarily about the speaker, but about the listeners. Henry knows how to read a room. It’s a gift that the playwright and the central figure of the play share.

I hope this production allows these two tones, personified by Henry’s two fathers — the brutality and razer-sharp strategy of his blood father, Henry Bolingbroke, and the absurdity and physicality and heart of his father-of-choice, Sir John Falstaff — to coexist in harmony. Our idea is that we don’t compromise either tone by bringing them to some luke-warm middle, but rather allow them to live vibrantly side-by-side, and invite you, the audience, to marry them in your imaginative experience of the play. Thank you for going on the journey with us, and I hope you enjoy the ride!

Before King Henry, there was Prince Hal. Discover the compelling backstory of the play by scanning the code to watch a quick video, created by Luis Quintero and other members of the company.