Time Trials (original) (raw)

"Henry V” (at the Delacorte Theatre, in Central Park, under the lively if uneven direction of Mark Wing-Davey) is Shakespeare’s version of three-card monte: what you see is never what you get. What seems, on the surface, a panegyric to the victor of the battle of Agincourt is, in the ironies of its structure and the antitheses of its speech, a cunning commentary on the hypocrisy of political personality.

The prodigal Prince Hal, having ascended the throne, has been born again. “The courses of his youth promised it not,” the Archbishop of Canterbury explains in the first scene:

The breath no sooner left his father’s body But that his wildness, mortified in him, Seemed to die too. . . . Never was such a sudden scholar made; Never came reformation in a flood With such a heady currance, scouring faults.

Now, to consolidate his kingship, Henry V (Liev Schreiber) follows the advice of his dying father in “Henry IV, Part 2”—“Busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels”—and attempts to turn a quarrel with France into a questionable war. For this, Henry needs the public and financial support of the Church; and, despite his fine display of judiciousness, as Shakespeare is at pains to show us through the positioning of scenes, the fix is more or less in.

Dissimulation is the name of Henry V’s game, just as it was his father’s. In “Henry IV, Part 1,” the King lectured his wayward son on the strategy of masquerade: “And then I stole all courtesy from heaven, / And dressed myself in such humility / That I did pluck allegiance from men’s hearts.” In “Henry V,” we see how well the son has learned his lessons: Henry is trapped in a perpetual performance of his power, his real personality impossible to locate. For this exemplar of elusive charm and steely willfulness, whose heroic presence is somehow shrouded in solitude, Schreiber is heaven-sent casting. At once compelling and unreachable, he has a swiftness of mind which convinces the audience that language is being coined in the moment. His speech, unlike that of the merely adequate supporting cast, feels lived rather than learned.

Henry V is a protean figure and a persuasive actor. All benevolent civility when he first meets the French Ambassador—“We are no tyrant, but a Christian king,” he says—he eventually unleashes the viciousness beneath his suave carapace, toying with the traitors in his midst before dispatching them and spouting bloodthirsty rhetoric at the battlements of Harfleur, where he offers a choice between capitulation and rape. In a show of perfect calm, during his famous St. Crispin’s Day speech to the troops, he hides from his men the pre-battle anxieties the audience has witnessed. Of all his manipulations, this turns out to be the greatest. With well-chosen words, Henry sidesteps his soldiers’ hunger, exhaustion, and fear (they’re outnumbered five to one) and taps directly into their sense of mission. “We . . . shall be remembered— / We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; / For he today that sheds his blood with me / Shall be my brother,” he announces, before leading them to victory.

Afterward, as he woos Princess Katherine of France (the kittenish Nicole Leach), an aristocratic hauteur soon replaces the democratic palaver of wartime. “Nice customs curtsy to great kings. . . . We are the makers of manners, Kate,” he tells the coy Princess. He then goes on to act the stumbling lover, “a fellow of plain and uncoined constancy.” Henry plays the part with such conviction that for a moment we forget that he’s been far from constant to Falstaff, who, during the play, dies heartbroken and nearly unnoticed by Henry, or to his father, whose overthrow and subsequent murder of Richard III he calls “the fault / My father made in compassing the crown.” Henry’s true voice—a mixture of eloquence, ruthlessness, and cold clinical wit—comes out only in the play’s great joke. Katherine asks in her demotic English, “Is it possible dat I sould love de ennemie of France?” “In loving me you should love the friend of France,” Henry replies, “for I love France so well that I will not part with a village of it—I will have it all mine.”

At the opening of Peter Gaitens’s elegant adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s 1995 novel “Flesh and Blood” (at the New York Theatre Workshop), a girl shakes a box containing the cremated remains of her forebears in the Stassos family. “It makes a noise,” the girl says, at which point the vanished world begins to speak to us—the voices of others who come to represent, in their particularity, all those buried voices we carry forever in our hearts, the ghosts of our fears and sorrows.

This scintillating family saga begins its elegiac trajectory—the play is three hours and twenty minutes long—in 1949, when an eager, provincial sixteen-year-old named Mary (the superb Cherry Jones) decides to marry a burly Greek immigrant, Constantine Stassos (expertly played by John Sierros). Constantine’s goodness is at odds with his brutishness. Always slightly misunderstanding or misunderstood, he never quite gets the language or the point of the abundant world he bustles through. Mary projects her ambitions, instead, onto her son, Billy (the compelling Peter Gaitens), the only one of her three children she feels she understands. Constantine, however, favors their elder daughter, Susan (Jessica Hecht), whose competition with her mother tips in her favor as her parents’ relationship grows more volatile and aloof over the years. No one’s favorite, the youngest child, Zoe (the poignant Martha Plimpton), sees herself for the changeling she is.

In this hothouse of frustrated aspirations and repressed fury, the Stassos children inevitably grow up driven by fierce, unfathomed needs. Billy becomes a homosexual; the well-married Susan dotes obsessively on her child, Ben (Sean Dugan), who is the spitting image of the gardener with whom she had a brief fling. Zoe wanders into promiscuity and drugs. “I used to think I should have . . . some kind of ambition,” she says in passing, “so that if people asked me what I was doing I’d have a better answer than, ‘I’m doing opium suppositories.’ ”

The plotlines are deftly crosshatched by the bold narrative construction and by the poised direction of Doug Hughes, who keeps the pace and the poignance clear. Time is the main character here, haunting and bedevilling the family, dealing out hurt and healing in unequal measure. In Act II, Mary, now divorced and living at a distance from her family and from herself, casts a cold eye over the wild card of destiny. “This is what’s happening,” she says. “I live by myself in a five-bedroom house. My oldest daughter hardly speaks to me. My son loves other men. My youngest child gave birth to an illegitimate half-black baby whose father is God knows where. And I am trying to dress for a lunch with my grandchild’s ‘godmother’ . . . and I have no idea what to wear because I’ve never had lunch with a man who wears dresses.” The transvestite in question is Cassandra, played by Jeff Weiss, in a high-camp star turn. Weiss, whose performance is both dashing and touching, brings to this collage of voices the pure bright note of frivolity, a refusal to suffer. “Honey,” he tells Zoe’s son, “the world is full of nothing if not surprises.”

The onslaught of time may be brutal, but “Flesh and Blood” has its comic moments. When the lonely Billy finally finds someone to love him—or, as he puts it, to make him “visible”—he is eager to introduce his lover, Harry (Peter Frechette), to his mother. In a scene that goes right to the heart of every parent’s emotional ambivalence, Mary pauses to address the audience. “I could tell him it turns my stomach,” she says. “I could treat this as a minor distraction and order dessert. I could pay him back. For everything.” Then she turns to her son. “Yes,” she says. “Yes, of course I want to meet him.”

“Flesh and Blood” asks us to see ourselves in a continuum. The enterprise is powerfully mysterious and consoling. It takes years, the play seems to be saying, to wake up, to accept ourselves, to find love, to change. Life can turn on a dime, and there is nothing for it but humor and hope and grit. At the end of the play, Mary, who, of all the characters, has made perhaps the longest emotional journey, observes her gay son, his lover, and her bereaved grandson, whose mother has died of aids. “I can love this,” she says. “I can try. . . . There’s nothing else for me to do. For this is what the living do. Here are the years to come. One hour and then another and another and another and another.” She goes on, “This isn’t the end. It never is. It’s the middle. It’s the beginning. It all depends on when you came in and when you have to go.” ♦