Director Aaron Posner has assembled some of the most splendid, certainly several of them among the most beloved actors who tread the local boards. Indeed, Folger Theatre has done further valuable service by bringing King John, a little done and most notoriously challenging play, to their stage.
Posner’s gift is to bring credible, contemporary and complex characterizations to his classical stagings.
The fashion of plays, like the popularity of rulers, comes and goes. There are many good reasons to exhume Shakespeare’s play, which for many years was mostly assigned to the dust heap. For one, the play has some women’s roles in King John that are most plum, and these come alive on the Folger stage deliciously.
The Queen Mum is Eleanor, who may be the most familiar of the characters to many Americans through the film The Lion in Winter. This Eleanor of Aquitaine, now older and a widow of King Henry, is played with wonderful and conniving elegance by Kate Goehring. She may have modulated her manner from her earlier, robust shenanigans with Henry, but she still has ambitions and a dog in this fight, championing son John on the throne. She determinedly stands by him however unfit a leader. Goehring channels something of what we might think of as Eleanor herself, by that I mean she conjures Kate Hepburn. Yes, there is something about the wisps of wiry hair escaping from the done-up knot and her slightly clawed hands (and did I only imagine the slightest whiff of palsy?) She blows in like a stiff and bracing wind, schooling others with her clear-eyed understanding of political expedience.
Holly Twyford gives us a roiling storm of a Constance, who wants to advance the claim of her own son Arthur. (The young adolescent boy is the son of Geoffrey, who was John’s older brother, so the claim has some legitimacy.) The way Constance and Eleanor trade insults is a cat-fight worth the price of admission.
There is also Blanche, King John’s niece, who is dispatched pretty early from the English court, when she is married off to King Philip of France’s son. Alina Collins Maldonado watches the proceedings, where she is used expediently to shore up a shaky political alliance and then almost at once falls victim to her uncle’s wrath and arrogance against the French, with chilling knowingness.
Posner has increased the play’s feminine equation exponentially by having women play men, especially two pivotal male roles in the unfolding drama about rival claims of power and succession. Kate Eastwood Norris plays Philip Faulconbridge, the super-smart, querulous bastard son of Richard I who is soon-in-the-play knighted as Sir Richard by half-brother King John. Watching the shorn-headed Kate embody this self-assured male political strategist pitch herself into the fray, we catch a performer at the height of her powers shape a journey of ferocious intensity in a true portrait of realpolitik.
Megan Graves, who most recently was seen in Brandon’s “life-in-a-cubicle” play, Gloria, at Woolly Mammoth, plays Arthur, King John’s nephew, and son to the unhappy and now deceased Geoffrey, John’s elder brother (I told you the play is complicated,) In the fight for power of the throne, Arthur is a pawn played for the highest of stakes and pitiable child in this most unhappy and dysfunctional of extended families. Graves has managed a complete physical transformation, looking the epitome of an adolescent boy from one of the most “posh” British public schools (think Eton or Harrow,) stuffed, as royals are, into little men’s bodies.
If Eastwood Norris is a hurricane, a force of nature that sweeps in and causes major damage, then Graves is an ice-storm throughout the first act, her face frozen, wide-eyed, transfixed. There is so much to be read behind the eyes of this mostly silent witness who seems from the start to telegraph her own sorry end.
Another reason for this being a play for this season is the title role. At the center of this disquieting drama is John, a petulant, narcissistic, choleric tyrant. Luckily, the remarkable Brian Dykstra eschews any parody of he-who-will-not-be-named but rather creates his own deliciously disturbing, multi-dimensional character. The actor alternately rants and cowers, and he fills his performance with little grace notes of detail. The first time he trips on the dais to the throne, his mother gives him a sharp look, and he tricked me into believing it might have been an actor mishap. But he trips again and again on his subsequent “ascents.” He takes off his crown; it doesn’t fit him. Another time, with the Cardinal Pandulf leading a ceremony of reinstatement and “crowning” after recently excommunicating him, he grabs for it like an impatient dog wanting to hold onto his bone. Later he curls into a fetal position.
Posner has chosen a play that holds a mirror up to nature – at least the nature of politics. With people switching allegiances, ratting each other out, quivering from upsetting the status quo, and a king who willy-nilly rules, guided not by astute policy but by his own whims, the production cuts close to the bone of today’s world.
In all the supporting roles prove outstanding actors, and Posner is most gifted in staging moments of who gets the baton to bring a new perspective in telling the story. Howard W. Overshown, as the French King Philip, has this terrible dilemma played out publicly where he is put on the spot to express his fealty to the church (and its supreme power) and his new alliance with the British throne, cemented by the just celebrated marriage of his son to the King John’s niece. His eyes roam around the people sharing the stage and then the audience as if looking for someone (in vain) with a moral compass. Akeem Davis as his son, the Dauphin, gives us a character who grows up very quickly in such a political hotbed, losing his childhood friend (Arthur,) thrust into a marriage, and soon thereafter plunged into a trumped-up war. The haunted eyes of Maboud Ebrahimzadeh as Lord Salisbury reflect great pools of despair and displacement, all adding up to solid ensemble-ship.
Nevertheless, there are some hefty challenges to the play.
The director has solved one of the play’s greatest challenges to an American audience, that of the ‘too many’ historical characters, in what I’ve come to recognize as a ‘Posnerian’ style: the direct address. A gifted adapter-playwright, he has crafted a prologue where one by one the actors march down stage and in direct address identify themselves, what they’re playing, and, in some narrow way, announce their function. It’s all spoken rapid fire and flat, so that the audience immediately feels grounded and thankful to be watching a modern (albeit deconstructed) work.
Some of the other choices, to my mind, do not provide graceful solutions to the play’s shortcomings. Many have criticized the play in other productions for being slow-moving and heavy-going. Posner has taken the opposite approach with Act I and seems to have gone for the “louder faster” school of modern direction. The sheer level of rant gets tiresome to the ear. But it also causes several of the performers, especially the women, to be vocally thrown time and again “on the ropes.” I detected raggedness in several of the performances, and this was only opening night.
This problem was compounded during the battle scenes by having the actors wield tiny flashlights and click them on-and-off while passing lines at top speed and volume. One scene of this was enough. The second time, the same effect was a complete turn-off. Lighting Designer To affect the “glare” the war or perhaps the complicity of the audience, Designer Max Doolittle brought in what I’ll call the Peter Sellars’ alienation effect: turning on banks of lights upstage pointing straight out at the audience. Alienating and unnecessary.
The second act settled and offered the most ‘chewy” parts of the production, full of quieter but all-the-more intense emotion. There was also greater focus by having sustained monologues and two-person scenes. Scene followed scene in the most satisfying and mesmerizing way.
Here, Holly Twyford comes into her own. As Constance she drifts onto the stage, barefoot and wild-haired. After years of wrangling for power, thrusting her son into the limelight, the character discovers she has been the undoing of her boy, and she comes unglued. She delivers one the most beautiful and heart-wrenching of Shakespeare’s monologues.
Two scenes between John and his most loyal advisor, Hubert, are delicious and yet hair-raising. Elan Zafir, always striking to watch, creates a lively connection with Dykstra that takes theatrical communion to another level, truly extraordinary. When John tells Hubert to “off” his nephew, they play with looks, innuendo slipped in almost as an aside, and musically “riff” like two great jazz musicians.
All builds psychologically preparing for the climactic scene between the imprisoned Arthur and his keeper, Hubert. Realizing his life is hanging in the balance, Arthur tries everything to win his freedom, playing, pleading, sobbing, and throwing himself physically upon the one man he has finally trusted. I found myself on the edge of my seat and watery-eyed watching the extraordinary Graves and Zafir, the desperate, innocent boy and the tormented, conflicted man.
Sound Design and Original Music by Lindsay Jones moved the play forward in most effective transitions from court to court and cued us to the mounting tension of a world imploding.
I loved the realization of the central set piece (and metaphor) of the throne. With with its high rough-hewn back, it became a handy hat-rack for a crown, a political rallying platform, and later a rampart on which to pillory a head or throw a body off. Likewise, the costumes, by Sarah Cubbage, used layers for texturizing the monochromatic palette. The crumpled, ill-fitted suit of King John was most cleverly chosen.
I would urge everyone to go through hell and high water (which we in Washington have had plenty of both recently) to see this production.
King John. Written by William Shakespeare. Directed by Aaron Posner. Scenic Design by Andrew Cohen. Lighting Design by Max Doolittle. Costume Design by Sarah Cubbage. Original Music and Sound Design by Lindsay Jones. With Akeem Davis, Brian Dykstra, Maboud Ebrahimzadeh, Kate Goehring, Megan Graves, Alina Collins Maldonado, Kate Eastwood Norris, Sasha Olinick, Howard W. Overshown, Brian Reisman, Holy Twyford, and Elan Zafir. Produced by Folger Theatre . Reviewed by Susan Galbraith.
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