31 minute read
The Muscle, the Clarity, the Detail
by SDC Journal
JOSEPH HAJ & DIRECTING SHAKESPEARE’S HISTORY PLAYS AT THE GUTHRIE
BY KATE PITT
Earlier this year, Kate Pitt served as part of a team of associate and assistant directors who worked with Joseph Haj on his marathon staging of Shakespeare’s History Plays: Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry V at the Guthrie Theater. In an expansive essay, she takes readers inside the rehearsal room.
“I wanted to make those plays since I got to the Guthrie nine years ago.” When Joseph Haj was announced as the Guthrie Theater’s eighth Artistic Director in 2015, he was already thinking about directing Shakespeare’s Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry V. “It wasn’t that he wanted to do them right away,” remembers casting director Jennifer Liestman, “but he told us, ‘This is something I’d like for the Guthrie to tackle again.’”
The Guthrie previously staged the plays that make up Shakespeare’s second tetralogy— Richard II, Henry IV Part I and Part II conflated into a single play, and Henry V—in 1990. Then, the Guthrie still had a resident company of actors and Artistic Director Garland Wright wanted to test them with the “ultimate challenge.” Actor Stephen Yoakam (known to everyone as Yoke) played Bolingbroke in that marathon staging, which was co-directed by Wright and Charles Newell. “That first day of rehearsal,” he remembers Garland saying, “‘We’re not ready to do this, but fasten your seat belts, because we’re going.’ I don’t think he thought at that point that the company was experienced enough, but he knew they were aggressive and hungry enough to be able to tackle a project that size.”
Anyone preparing to take on the plays collectively and colloquially known as “the Histories” will be hit by their scale: more than 150 characters and 13,000 lines of text describing 22 years of English history between 1398 and 1420. Some of the most famous characters in English literature (Falstaff) and history (Henry V) as well as lines well-known enough to be cliché: “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” Since 1990, SDC Members have filed 23 contracts for full productions of Richard II, 48 for Henry IV, and 51 for Henry V. But no directors—other than Wright and Newell, and now Haj—have made all three plays at once, in rep.
Simply staying upright seems like a win, but Wright and Newell had a more expansive goal. “The purpose of the show was to create company,” remembers Tree O’Halloran, a long-time Guthrie stage manager who worked at the theatre in 1990 and stage-managed the Histories in 2024. Garland wanted the company to “work together, for a long period of time, on a canvas that was enormous,” recalls Yoke. “You were called all the time to do something. If you weren’t working on Henry V, you were working on Richard II in a different space. You’d pass somebody in the hallway, and he’d say, ‘What are guys doing today?’ ‘We’re doing Henry V.’ ‘Which part of it are you doing? Because I’m in that next scene.’ It was always mixing and matching and sprinting to catch up.”
Joe Haj was one of the runners then. After performing in JoAnne Akalaitis’s production of The Screens in 1989, he returned the following year to play Bagot, John of Lancaster, and Bedford in the Histories and Henry Antrobus in Robert Woodruff’s production of The Skin of Our Teeth. Joe was 26 and, Yoke says, “obviously from the get-go really, really amazing at handling language. He also had a physical presence because he was an athlete…a talented, physically gifted young actor.” Many members of the company were ex-jocks and played basketball together on Fridays. Their enthusiastic athleticism was transfixing on stage.
Yoke remembers how in Henry V, the actor playing the king stabbed a knife into the stage floor at each performance and Joe’s job as Bedford was to clear it at the end of the scene. One night, the actor “stabbed it so far into the deck that Joe couldn’t get it out. He was sitting there going like this [pulling] as the scene was changing, and he was completely exposed and completely embarrassed. I think he finally just yanked it out, but [the transition] bled into the next [scene].”
No knives were embedded in floors when Joe directed the Histories in 2024. Originally scheduled for the 2020–2021 season but delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the plays still felt important to produce after four years. “I think you could have produced them any time in the last 400 years, and you would never be mistimed,” Joe says.
“Their themes center on leadership, and the cost of leadership. Themes about our overweening ambitions and what trouble our pesky egos can get us into. These are things that are always true, always relevant, always conditions of being human. Ambition at what price? Ambition at what cost, to myself or to others? What is one willing to sacrifice to become a person who, for whatever reason, wants to wear that crown?”
Although the 1990 History Plays were codirected (and Joe had previously co-directed Henry IV and Henry V with Mike Donahue at PlayMakers Rep, where Joe served as Producing Artistic Director), he decided to lead the 2024 Histories solo with a team of associate and assistant directors.
Joe developed his strong opinions through long experience. His first directing job was Henry V with inmates in a maximum-security prison. The 2024 Guthrie Histories would be his third Richard II, third Henry IV, and sixth Henry V as an actor or director. That familiarity armed him with “an accumulated knowledge of where the cul-de-sacs are. Where it’s like, ‘Wow, we spun out in that thing, and I had the actors in that space for three weeks before I realized there’s no there there and had to bring them back.’” With only eight weeks of rehearsal before tech, there simply wasn’t time to get lost.
“If I hadn’t worked with Joe before, I wouldn’t think we could do it,” says Tree, who first worked with Joe at the Guthrie on King Lear in 2017. She initially built his schedules the way she had for all other directors she’d worked with in her 30+ year career: Joe would tell her that he needed an hour of rehearsal time, and she would allow for slightly more because “most directors end up using more time.”
But Joe kept strictly to schedule, and Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry V were each staged in a week.
Joe found actors who could work that quickly “by bringing in the people he knows and loves, and really vetting people who he didn’t know,” says Tree. Almost everyone in the Histories cast had either previously worked with Joe or in classical rotating repertory.
The actors who were in the room understood the assignment. “Joe did not ask for 80 percent of the actors showing up off book on day one, but it happened,” says Tyler Michaels King, who played Richard II. “It set a standard for, ‘We’re here to get this massive amount of work done.’ Because we know we don’t have enough time.”
According to Tyler, “It was implicitly said that, ‘We are going to do this work in the room, and it is not going to be enough time to make it a great show, so you have to work on this outside of the room.’” Voice and text coach Sara Becker, as well as the one associate and two assistant directors were available to the actors for that work. “I felt that Joe trusted me to go and do that work with other people and hold the central conceit of what he’s shooting for…and then bring it back and get more heightened and more specific because I had more fully understood it,” Tyler says. “Joe allowing the permission for that to happen is a huge success…If he had been more grippy on the whole thing, I don’t think we would have gotten as rich of an experience.”
Because so many in the company arrived with their lines memorized, line notes were emailed out starting the first week of rehearsals and continued through previews. Not everyone was a fan of such a long period of notes. One actor called the stage manager down to their dressing room before a preview “to express their displeasure with the idea that they’re getting notes about lines at this point in the game, when they know they got the line wrong.”
Joe’s credo, as Tyler interprets it, is: “The words are the words, and we present these words as beautifully as possible.” In his rehearsals, “you can walk around and kind of do anything you want to on stage. But if the language is unclear, he’s gonna check you on it.”
Joe’s insistence on textual fidelity and clarity starts during table work. The eight weeks of rehearsal for the Histories began with a week of table work on all three plays that “really set the expectations of what world we’re trying to build together…because it was about the language, it was about the character relationships, it was about the dramaturgy of the language on the page, and how we must clearly express that,” says Tyler.
Histories and Guthrie dramaturg Carla Steen agrees: “One of the things that I think Joe is very, very good at is understanding the text and presenting it as clearly as possible.” Clarity was particularly important for the three-play marathon of the Histories. Richard II starts mid-argument with gauntlets and accusations flying. “If we don’t get this thing, the central argument into the room, we’re dead. We’re dead for the whole night,” Joe asserts. And, since Henry IV and Henry V build on the events in Richard II, audiences planning to see all the plays needed to be able to follow the story across multiple evenings or the all-day opening.
Richard II was the first Shakespeare play that Joe read cover to cover. He was in grad school and not a Shakespeare fan. Those opening scenes— “Who is the Duke of Gloucester?” “Why do we care who killed him?” “What did the king have to do with it?”—were, he thought, impossible to follow. Joe asked his grad school roommate, Michael Cumpsty (for many years one of the country’s leading Shakespeare actors) for help, and Michael explained the story and essentially table-worked the play in their apartment. Joe’s opinion on Shakespeare shifted: “Who on earth writes like this? It’s impossible. It’s impossible. It struck me so deeply.”
For Joe, the emotional impact of Shakespeare depends on the clarity and specificity of language that he discovered in grad school. “I don’t know what it is about Shakespeare, but it’ll nudge even very good actors sometimes to their worst impulses…I’ve seen really wonderful actors get into Shakespeare and you just feel the generality. It’s like, ‘I think I’m vaguely angry for these 10 lines, and I think I’m a little sad for these six lines.’” Joe believes in staying at the table “long enough that people aren’t out on stage moving their mouths with words they have actually no specific understanding of.”
That week of table work felt like a classroom. “There wasn’t really a whole lot of fooling around,” remarks Dr. Penelope Geng, an associate professor of English at Macalester College who observed several rehearsals. “I was really struck by the workshop’s seminar-style-like vibe…I really admired the way that [Joe] would ask a simple question and step back and allow people to fill in the void.”
It is important, Joe believes, to answer as many questions around the table as possible so that “the information lands more deeply, it’s understood more completely” before actors get up on their feet. Questions always will come up during the rehearsal process; Joe would prefer to answer them earlier rather than later. “It feels less hard, less expensive to actors to be wrestling with those questions when we’re sitting at a table staring at a script. If we don’t get it answered around the table, they’re going to have the same question when on their feet, and it’s harder for actors to grapple with textual questions while also trying to understand their bodies in space.”
Joe is open to those questions and doesn’t always feel the need to answer them. “You can ask a question, you can ask any question…You may not always get the answer you want, or you may not get an answer at all,” says Yoke, who returned to the Histories in 2024 to play Northumberland. “I’ve always thought that Joe was able to say, ‘I don’t know.’”
There is a difference between the not-knowing that results from a lack of preparation and that which allows for an abundance of discovery. As Joe acknowledges, “I say, ‘I don’t know’ a lot in rehearsal, but I don’t like to pretend I don’t know things. If there are things I know, I’ll say, ‘I think it’s this,’ and we can just move on to the next thing. So when I say, ‘I don’t know,’ you can just watch the team climb into that space, helping us know.”
Joe credits this ability to the preparation he does before he walks into the rehearsal room. He storyboarded all three plays and feels strongly that “if I’m not prepped deeply on the front end, I’m not watching the actor, I’m staring at the script. The greatest gift I can give to an actor is the quality of my attention. So the best thing I can do is to know it all well enough that I can be fully present to what’s happening in front of me.”
That fullness of presence is auditory as well as visual. Joe occasionally listens to actors with his eyes closed, an inclination he attributes to his father, who was blind. William (Will) Sturdivant, who played Bolingbroke, describes how in rehearsals, “you can hear [Joe] listening. Closing his eyes and really hearing it, which is nice because you’re like, ‘I don’t know exactly what I’m doing, but I know what I’m saying.’”
Joe can prompt most of the plays from memory and often does. Some actors were frustrated getting line notes from a director whose eyes were literally closed, but Joe maintains that “it’s good for the actors because it reminds us if you’re not saying the right words in the right order, somebody in the room is going to know.”
This recall also allows Joe freedom of movement in the rehearsal room: “I don’t have to stare at the script and follow along to understand what the things are. I could just watch and listen to the actors and respond and respond and respond and respond. And that’s the beauty of knowing it well. [It] allows you to get up, allows you to get around the room, allows you to stand in close with the actors.”
Joe sometimes sits in a chair next to the directors’ table, almost never behind it. If he’s sitting, he will frequently jump up to help an actor figure out an action: how Hal should touch his sleeping father, or whether Doll Tearsheet rolling drunkenly across a table would work better with her legs upstage or downstage (downstage).
“I’ve always appreciated the fact that he’s not stuck behind the table” says Yoke. “It’s nice to have somebody come out on the floor with you…[and] talk about what actually happens, what the posture is, where the impulses are to move. He’s a very physical director in that aspect.” Tyler attributes Joe’s movements in the rehearsal room to his performance experience: “He gets the muscularity of being an actor. He’s embodied that himself…he was so clear on what it takes to speak language fully in that space.”
The Wurtele Thrust Stage at the Guthrie, where the Histories performed in 2024, is a 1,100-seat theatre. “There’s a kind of performance that I adore, the quiet, reactive performance,” Joe says. “Those things vanish on the Guthrie thrust.” Joe’s experience performing on previous Guthrie thrusts taught him that they require “a muscularity in the playing. You’ve got to get on the front foot. That room responds to enormous appetite. The chase. ‘What do you want?’ ‘What are you after?’ The Acting 101 things, but what’s required in that space is simply not the same thing that is required if we were making the very same productions in a different physical environment.”
In order to develop the required muscularity, Joe made sure the Histories company knew that rehearsing and performing the Histories would be an athletic feat. “He’s a coach, when it comes to actors,” says Tree. He told the company that he “was going to push real hard early [so] that they build the muscle, they build the expectation. Days are going to be long; they’re going to be really demanding.” Joe made it clear that the actors couldn’t be “strolling around and making jokes 30 seconds before the stage manager calls places and think you’re going to hit this thing in the right way. You’re not going to, you are not going to—none of us are that good. This stuff is hard. We need the confidence of knowing we’ve rehearsed well and are making something strong, combined with the humility of knowing that these are works of uncommon demand. And the only way to build the muscle, the clarity, the detail, the specificity, the concentration, and the stamina is to build it.”
On the first day of rehearsals in January 2024, Joe quoted former Guthrie Artistic Director Liviu Ciulei: “We don’t have very much time, so we must work very slowly.” However, the eight weeks of rehearsals proceeded quickly. After the initial week of table work on all three plays, each play was staged and stumbled in the next three weeks, then revisited and run the three weeks after that. The final week before tech was used for notes, cuts, and spacing on all three plays. The month that followed was divided into a week of tech and two previews for each show. In the final week, each show was revisited and had a third preview before the marathon opening.
Rehearsals never ran over and occasionally even ended early. Joe credits the staff with this accomplishment: “It’s a tremendous testament to the directing team and the stage management team that we did not have one day in two months that we did not make our day.” And they credit him: “I can schedule all I want,” says stage manager Tree, but “we don’t make the day unless Joe does the work.”
At the end of the day, Joe says, “You can’t ask anybody to work any harder than you’re willing to work. You can’t lead anybody any further than you can go. You can’t. So part of making our day every day for two months of rehearsal and one month of tech was a way to signal to the company, we’re ready, we’re prepared, we have a plan, you are well taken care of. Every single actor always knows 100 percent of the time when a director is not ready. I know that because I was an actor for a really long time. And most of us as actors are far too polite to go, ‘Well, we’re playing this silly theatre game for 30 minutes so that you can buy time to figure out what the fuck you want to do with that scene.’”
“There’s not a lot of mucking about” in Joe’s rehearsal style, says Tyler, who played Bedford in addition to Richard II. “There’s a lot of artistic intention and moving forward and getting to the end goal that we both see, and there is a kind of joy and expression in that but it’s very linear. It’s not…‘Well, let’s try it this way, or this way, or this way. And, yeah, here’s an acting block, let’s see what happens.’ It’s much more direct.” Will remembers that during Henry IV rehearsals, “We had one day when we did [my] death scene four or five times in a row. That martini was incredible afterwards, but that was all we touched it, really. We didn’t really do too much more on that heavy, emotional thing, but we got it in our bones well enough to keep it there.”
“So much of the art, of the art form, is the ability to concentrate for very long periods of time. That’s as true for directors...as it is for actors.”
Certain expectations in the rehearsal room were clear, but unspoken. “I don’t know if Joe said this directly, but I felt like him calling us to be front-footed the whole time we were on stage,” remembers Tyler. “There wasn’t a moment where we could kick back. Even if we were just standing there listening…we are there to help communicate the story.”
When Tyler thinks of working with Joe, he thinks of “really working with the dude. I know that I’m going to get in the room, and I’m going to prepare a shit ton beforehand…I’m going to come in with some strong ideas. And then we’re going to do the work kind of fast, and we’re going to do it efficiently.”
Every director develops their own vocabulary. Their version of “yes,” “no,” and “faster.” Joe’s “yeses” are: “Let’s take that for a ride,” “That’s what it wants,” and “I’ll take some version of…” His “nos” sound like: “I think you need to anchor still more strongly…,” “I don’t think there’s anything meaningful to collect from that,” and “Don’t make too much of a meal.” “Fasters” are: “Drive through,” and “Push for home” with the caveat, “Don’t go faster than you can image.” Will remembers Joe telling him, “‘Speak at the rate of your thought and let us just hear that and see what that does.’”
Joe believes the personal pronoun is almost never emphasized in Shakespeare and every run is an opportunity to learn something new. These mantras were expressed as, “Get Off the Pronoun,” and “Don’t Waste the Rep.” During previews, Joe “would always say, ‘the likelihood that everything goes right tonight is exactly zero,’ remembers Tyler, ‘so don’t go in the tank when something goes wrong.’ I don’t know what ‘the tank’ is, but I get it.”
Joe deliberately cast actors “who create—if joy is not the exact word—a profound satisfaction by digging in so deeply, concentrating so deeply, building stamina. We knew from the jump that we were going to have performance days that are 13 hours long. You can’t just roll into the theatre and think you can do that. You need to build that muscle. So much of the art, of the art form, is the ability to concentrate for very long periods of time. That’s as true for directors, frankly, in my view as it is for actors.”
One way that Joe builds the ability to concentrate in actors is by allowing a potential distraction into the room: outside observers. Allowing them to attend rehearsals is part of Joe’s practice as a director because of his experiences on stage. “I remember so clearly as an actor you rehearse and rehearse, you’re in your closed system with all of the accustomed people who are in the room. And then you get to that designer run or the artistic director comes to have a look at a run through…and chemically for the actor, things change. And sometimes for the good and sometimes not for the good. Sometimes you just watch folks getting in their head. [I’m] like, ‘Why don’t we get that shit out of the way early?’ So we’re not wrestling with that when we’re in previews.”
In introducing the observers when they first arrived, Joe quoted Mary Zimmerman: “The rehearsal process is sacred, but it is not fragile.” Yoke agrees that having observers in the room made all the actors “sit up a little bit higher.” They bring “a slightly different, sharper focus…It’s a funny chemistry that happens.”
Joe often starts a note by speaking to the room while walking towards an actor and then quietly continuing the conversation one-on-one. One of the observers, Mark Catron (father of actor John Catron, who played Hotspur) noted this approach with Tracey Maloney, the actor who played Lady Percy.
“The actor had just delivered a hugely, powerfully moving grief- and tear-laden speech, a pouring out of heart and soul. Very, very powerful, just wonderfully done. And at the end of that, Joe stopped the action and they met at center stage. He’s six foot or better, she’s maybe five two. But they had a long eye-to-eye conversation. And then, at the end of that, he asked her to do the whole thing again. And I thought, ‘How could you do that?’ I mean, you know, she’s just given you everything she has. And then you put her through it all again. But it reveals the hard work and depth of commitment that he expects, and that he gets. Kind of the quiet authority that he has in making sure that everybody shares his vision.”
To an outside observer like Mark, Joe’s direction in that moment felt meticulous but not unkind. Rather, it “seemed like he was trying to support her, trying to lead her, trying to make sure that she felt his support behind her in that very, very vulnerable moment.” Mark, a retired lawyer in the Twin Cities, had attended many of his son’s previous performances at the Guthrie but had never seen him rehearse. He was glad to have the opportunity to see his son work, even if watching him fight and die as Hotspur “wasn’t easy the first time. I mean, that was, you know, it’s a hard thing to watch that.”
Building the actors’ concentration is not the only reason that Joe allows observers into the rehearsal room. He also wants staff and board members to see “how fucking hard it is to make anything that is legible, beautiful, smart on stage” and dispel any notions that the work is easy. “I don’t know what it is about our discipline,” he says.
“Nobody—literally zero people—would [say], ‘If I had a violin, I could play for the Philharmonic, I don’t see why not.’ But almost everybody thinks that, ‘If I could just learn all the lines, I too could be an actor.’ Which is absurd. These are artists and there’s a profound artistry and craft involved in that. But everybody thinks they can do it. And when somebody comes and watches a rehearsal where we wrestle with a line sequence, we wrestle with it rhythmically, we wrestle for the sense…it’s eye opening for folks to recognize and realize that this is an art form which requires extraordinary artists working really hard.”
That hard work was particularly visible during the Histories tech, an epic process that inevitably included bumps. Joe shared with the company that on his first day of tech for Richard II as an actor in 1990, he was deeply frustrated with his elaborate Bagot costume and, after tripping on it for the umpteenth time, shouted his unhappiness into the tech-dark house. From the back of the room came the voice of costume designer Ann Hould-Ward: “You have it on backwards.”
In 2024, there were cast shifts, set cuts, and a trap that started its downwards trajectory with a lurch that “revived the dead.” The blood in the blood sword didn’t look “bloody” enough, the fake leek didn’t look “leeky” enough, and the breakable mirror broke.
By week 11, after teching and previewing both Richard II and Henry IV, the company was halfway through Henry V—and tired. During notes after one of the previews, Joe returned to his analogy about actors and athletes. He told the company that he was a road biker for many years and described how the endurance required for long rides was similar to that required for the Histories “You think that the differential between riding 75 or 78 miles and riding 100 miles is a matter of fitness, and it’s not,” Joe told the company. “The difference between riding 75 or 78 miles and riding 100 miles is simply a matter of developing your capacity for suffering. How much can you endure?” His direction to them in this difficult moment? “Increase your capacity for suffering.”
It was a radically different rallying cry than the ones the company had been listening to all week. Not, “Once more…” or “We happy few…” but rather, “Again. And again,” plus suffering. During the rehearsal process, the parallels between Joe and Henry V were clear. Joe described his Hal-like transformation from a teenage slacker who skipped class to go to the beach into a highly disciplined artistic leader with a “huge capacity for work.” In his calm before the first designer run, he looked like Henry reassuring his troops before Agincourt, standing by his chair while actors dodged around the packed room to ask last-minute questions. And there was the question that followed the entire Histories project: “What is one willing to sacrifice to become a person who, for whatever reason, wants to wear that crown?”
For a company at the moment of maximum exhaustion, hearing “increase your capacity for suffering” seemed more likely to cause a riot than a return to rehearsal. But the work that Joe had done to create a company that wanted to dig in, that wanted to work hard, that wanted to build a new muscle and use it, paid off. When Tyler heard Joe say “increase your capacity for suffering” he understood [it as]: “I believe in this company to do this, and that hardship will yield great rewards, and we will come out on the other side of this with a rich and rewarding experience.”
“It wasn’t said without generosity. It wasn’t said without compassion,” he remembers, “but it was also said with strength. And with this sort of sense of authority and leadership that we are trying to accomplish something bigger than ourselves. And the capacity to be able to do that is something greater than any one of our bodies can hold at this one point. And yet, we should do it because it’s going to be an incredible thing.”
The Histories marathon was built to be exactly that: a marathon. A moonshot attempted precisely because it was hard. Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry V are epic in their intelligence, scale, and ambition and the opportunity to make them together comes around once in a generation. In 1989, Garland Wright wrote that directing Shakespeare allows for the possibility that “all of us can release into that thing that’s better than the sum of all of us in our ordinary state in the hopes that maybe we will have participated in the whole continuum of history, in terms of those things that are great about being human.”
When Joe is making work, he thinks about his “mentors, colleagues, friends…I’ll sit in rehearsal sometimes and look at a thing and go, ‘I wonder how JoAnne would look at that? I wonder what Woodruff would think of this?’...Garland’s long, long gone. I think about how Garland would look at a thing. I do, I do.”
Joe remembers Garland telling him, “‘There’s only one reason to be a theatre artist finally and that’s because it makes you a bigger person.’ So I’m interested in a process that feels like growth to all the people who are part of it. That everybody will leave the process feeling bigger than they were when they came into it.”
The program for the Histories included memories from company members who worked on the plays in 1990. Stage manager Jill Rendall described the first marathon day as “the most thrilling day I have ever spent as a stage manager.” When she called the opening cues for Henry V and the full company walked on stage to deliver the Chorus, “the entire audience leapt to its feet, marveling at this company of actors, technicians, and stage managers launching into their third play of the day. Everything onstage stopped. The moment rendered us all speechless, the headsets silent.”
In 2020 when the Guthrie was closed, Joe recorded a message reminding audiences that, “In the end, we’re going to need a place where we can re-gather, a place where we can celebrate, where we can join in joy and entertainment…At some point in the near future, I will ask you to do this again.”
“I don’t have to make the perfect anything. I don’t have to make the thing nobody’s ever seen. I don’t have to do any ofthose things. I just have to try to make the thing as beautifully as I know how with these collaborators in this process.”
More than a thousand audience members from 26 states and two Canadian provinces travelled to the Guthrie for the Histories marathon opening day on April 13, 2024. Richard II started at 10:30 am and Henry V came down after 11 pm. Watching them, Joe was reminded of an experience he had on a tour of the theatre archives at the Folger Shakespeare Library when he directed Hamlet there in 2010. “I remember [the librarians] taking these prompt books down and looking in the margins, which are filled, filled, filled with scribbles of…artists just like us, trying to wrestle to the ground the hardest material in the world. Trying to find a path into it, trying to make something that may be beautiful for people to come and participate in and watch. I realized this play has been around for centuries…we’re just in the river of the long history of this play.”
“We get to go in, splash around a little bit, make our minor contribution to this eons-long contemplation of this play. It was so disburdening…I don’t have to make the perfect anything. I don’t have to make the thing nobody’s ever seen. I don’t have to do any of those things. I just have to try to make the thing as beautifully as I know how with these collaborators in this process, that’s my only responsibility. And I found it really beautiful to feel myself in that moment in this long tradition of makers.”
On opening night, when the entire company of the Histories walked on stage, led by Yoke, for the opening Chorus of Henry V, just as they had 34 years ago, the audience stood and cheered and cheered.
Kate Pitt is a director and dramaturg based in New York City. katepitt.com
