A War for the Ages

Although sappy theatrical productions dealing with the likes of Elvis and the Beach Boys are filling New York’s stages, directors, and theatergoers have not turned their backs on Shakespeare. Director Edward Hall recently received stellar critical acclaim for the five-and-a-half-hour Rose Rage, which set all three parts of Henry VI in a Victorian slaughterhouse. Now, Twenty Feet Productions and Artistic Director Marc Silberschatz are staging following a similar path with Wars of the Roses.

Silberschatz started Twenty Feet Productions because he grew tired of being in bad plays as an actor.

“They were bad because they were poorly directed” he said. “Either not having any kind of directorial idea behind [them] or having one that was so extreme that you lose the actual story,” Now after forming his own production company, he is directing and acting in a large project which has been on his mind for years: Shakespeare’s entire historical series chronicling England’s Wars of the Roses.

The eight plays, including Richard II, Henry IV Parts One and Two, Henry V, Henry VI Parts One, Two, and Three, and Richard III, will be performed by only 12 actors. Because one actor must play several roles in each play, Silberschatz’s actors have to commit over 2700 lines to memory.

This incredible amount of work and the time constraint on the production schedule have created an exhausted cast. “Nothing can prepare you for taking on something of this size,” Silberschatz admitted. “[While] one play takes this much effort, eight plays takes that much effort to the eighth power!”

Still, Silberschatz has committed himself to the project because of the nature of the story. “The eight plays are written in such a way that you could almost treat them as one play.” he said. “There [are] no gaps in the history,” By telling the eight plays together, the audience is able to witness the progression of each character from play to play. For example, one can easily watch Richard III transform from the innocent eighteen-year-old boy in Henry VI Part Two to the power hungry “monster” of Richard III.

From play to play, Silberschatz said that each character expresses a certain “diseased morality ... [which] eats away at the society of [an] entire people for hundreds of years like cancer ... until all you’re left with is this black deformed lump of what everything formerly was.”

While the plays were written 400 years ago, the parallels between the plays and the reality of America today are striking. Silberschatz explained, “It is hard for me to look at the plays and not see parallels with [the] last five years.” From Henry IV, who steals the leadership of a country, to Henry V, who invades a country without a logical reason, to Henry VI, who must deal with the insurgency within that country, the actions of Shakespeare’s characters closely match the actions of the current presidential administration, Silberschatz said.

By looking at the plays in this light, one comes to appreciate the brilliance of Shakespeare, a man who understood the natural progression of events. Silberschatz wants audiences to see this truth and perhaps to contemplate whether “we want to see our own version of Richard III show up down the road.”

When directing a Shakespearean work, Silberschatz stressed the importance of relying on the text and enhancing its meaning through the actions and portrayals of each character. As a result, Wars of the Roses has no set time period. The actors in the fight scenes use broad swords, but the actor playing Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, wears a double-breasted suit. Silberschatz uses a similarly strange technique with the actors he cast. Henry IV (Kymberly Tuttle) and Richard III (Sirrah Harris) are played by women while Queen Margaret (Seth Duerr) is played by a man.

After Wars of the Roses closes on March 4, Twenty Feet Productions will continue with more Shakespeare but will also branch out into other dramatic productions. According to Silberschatz, Shakespeare wrote characters with an enormous capacity to love, whether others, themselves, or power. “This gives the capacity to do everything else ... and I want to do shows like that.