Closing the New York Shakespeare Festival’s twenty-fifth season at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park this year is a production of “Henry IV, Part I,” directed by Joe Papp. It’s fairly typical of Central Park Shakespeare in that the less you know about the play, the better off you are. The approach that Mr. Papp takes to “Henry” is roughly the same approach that the Marx Brothers take to a legal contract in “A Night at the Opera”: what he likes he keeps; what he doesn’t understand he tears off and throws away. He doesn’t seem to like the first scene of the play; this production begins with Scene 2. He doesn’t seem to like the characters Glendower, Mortimer, and Mortimer’s Welsh-speaking wife: they do not appear in this production—which may be better judged on what it lacks than on what it boasts. It lacks a good deal of key dialogue, some of the play’s finest imagery, and a coherent notion of what it’s all about. It boasts a performance by Donald Moffat as Falstaff.
I wish I could find something positive to say about Mr. Moffat beyond the fact that he delivers his lines surely and lucidly. It is unquestionably a competent performance. But Mr. Moffat’s Falstaff is somewhat indistinct. He seems neither particularly dangerous nor particularly charismatic—just sort of ordinary. He might be any old man in English literature. “Henry IV, Part I” is what scholars call a psychomachia: it’s a battle over the soul of Prince Hal, the future Henry V, with Falstaff (as the “lord of misrule”) and the old King as the chief contenders. The latter represents the chivalric values voiced most often in the play by Hotspur, the young nobleman who figures so prominently in the rebellion against the King. But Hotspur’s notions of “honor” are a little outdated and demonstrably incapable of surviving in the real world. Falstaff is an even more problematic ambiguous figure, who can be viewed either as a “sweet creature of bombast” or a “villainous abominable misleader of youth.” (Hal calls him both.) But whichever side of Falstaff a director decides to emphasize, it helps if we can understand both the characater’s tremendous charm and appeal and the sinister implications of his moral viewpoint.
Mr. Moffat makes us aware of neither; and there’s little else to hold our attention. Every aspect of the production is routine. Mr. Papp’s one innovation has been to set the play entirely in the Boar’s Head Tavern, as a play within a play—though for what purpose I can’t think, unless it was to save David Mitchell, the scenic designer, from having to provide more than a few beer kegs and mock-Tudor beams by way of a set. The idea that staging, music, lighting, costumes, or scenery can create or comment on the world of a play seems not to have occurred to anyone. Theoni Aldredge’s costumes keep the company clad, Jules Fisher’s lighting makes the stage visible, Peter Golub’s music reminds us, with the occasional fanfare, that we are watching a history play. Even the fight sequences (by Malcolm Ranson) look staged. And the production is full of gaffes. Hal (Tony Soper) addresses the opening lines of his famous soliloquy—“I know you all, and will awhile uphold/The unyok’d humour of your idleness”—to the audience, as though it were we, rather than his departing friends, whose company he intends to forswear when the time comes for his reformation. And in Act V, when he enters entreating Falstaff, “Lend me thy sword,” Papp has Mr. Soper stagger out empty-handed, gesturing for Falstaff’s sword. (The expression is figurative, as in “Lend me your ears.” Hal is asking Falstaff to join in the fighting.)
There are other directorial lapses: the staging is poor, the blocking static, and the pacing desperately slow throughout. Life at the Boar’s Head seems more turgid than diverting or entertaining. (Mr. Papp does try to liven things up with a gratuitous piece of audience participation.) For the most part, though, what makes this production of “Henry” so tedious is the acting. There is much hamming from the British members of the cast, while many of the Americans seem not to understand their lines. Mr. Soper is a rather bland Hal; he delivers his lines with a sense of the poetry, but with no conviction, and so fails to have moral impact. Conan McCarty plays young Hotspur as though he were playing Hamlet: thinking, brooding, rationalizing in soliloquy. His Percy is neither comic nor noble in his passionate tirades. (He should be both.) As Mistress Quickly, Theresa Merritt seems not to know she is playing a comic role. Michael Zaslow’s King Henry is properly regal and commanding, but we none of the complexity of “subtle Bolingbroke.” The actors seem on the whole undirected. They are like musicians who, playing all the right notes of a symphony, fail to make music because they fail to stir.
Of course, what goes on inside the Delacorte Theatre is only half of Shakespeare in the Park—the downside. The upside of the experience is the part that critics don’t get to share: the sitting around in Central Park waiting for your ticket. You set aside a Sunday or part of an afternoon and take your blanket and your friend, and go and lie in the sun with a book. You don’t get much reading done because of the soccer players and softball players, the strains of folk-dance music coming from over by King Jagiello’s statue. There’s a lot going on—the funny old man with a basket who walks around bothering people, telling them to “make a wish—in any language,” the not very good puppeteer who plays the “Masterpiece Theatre” theme on the kazoo and does a one-man, ten-minute parody of the play from behind a stand-up tent. So instead of reading you watch little girls playing timeless clapping games in a nearby tree and look forward to the play with a childlike anticipation that should have been stamped out years ago (by how many mediocre productions of Shakespeare?) but somehow never was.
This summer, in honor of the N.Y.S.F.’s twenty-fifth anniversary, I went through the park-sitting routine. I did the whole bit: I sat there for four hours, watching the children and the soccer players and the puppet show, put money in the old man’s basket, let the N.Y.S.F. official passing out plot synopses show me the misprint in the Folger edition (actually, he couldn’t find it). And while I sat there I did a lot of thinking about Joe Papp and the New York Shakespeare Festival. I thought about the English teacher who used to take us to see Papp’s productions on the principle that “any Shakespeare is better than no Shakespeare at all.” I thought about the retired sailor I once met standing in the rain outside the Delacorte Theatre, who told me he’d seen every production ever put on there.
I bought a “25th Anniversary Souvenir Book” and sat perusing it for a while, and I learned some interesting things. Papp really covered a lot of ground in those early years and he used the time well: in the first ten seasons there wasn’t a single repeat. Many of the later productions were things I had to admit I wouldn’t have wanted to see. (Judy Collins in “Peer Gynt”? Meatloaf in “As You Like It”? Charles Durning in “Twelfth Night”? Martin Sheen in “Romeo and Juliet”?) But I was surprised to see from the photographs how relatively straightforward and ungimmicky early Central Park Shakespeare had been; the craziness—the pop stars and the musicals and all the non-classical productions—didn’t set in until later. And (if you don’t count “The Two Noble Kinsmen”) Papp really has managed to produce all but one of the plays.
That English teacher of mine was of two minds about Falstaff: she wanted us to understand his connection with the vice figure in medieval morality plays, but she also wanted us to see the truth in the old knight’s “Banish plump Jack and banish all the world!” I used to think Papp had a lot to answer for to a generation of children brought up on fourth-rate Shakespeare—my generation. I guess I still do. Papp isn’t a director so much as he is an entrepreneur. He knows how to raise money, stir up enthusiasm, and show the city off to advantage, but I don’t think he knows or cares very much about Shakespeare. All the same, you have to hand it to the guy: he really has created a wonderful tradition—if not a great theatrical event, at least a great civic one.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, September 7, 1987