The Old Globe’s Barry Edelstein on Shakespeare and Community

The Reading Room Festival returns for its third year (January 30–February 2), sharing staged readings, panel discussions, workshops, and community celebrations in a collaborative exploration—with artist, scholars, critics, and audiences—of the multifaceted nature of Shakespeare’s stories. Leading up to the festival, we’re featuring the creators involved. 

Kicking off this year’s Reading Room Festival is Barry Edelstein, Artistic Director of San Diego’s Old Globe, who is talking about how he adapted and directed Shakespeare’s rarely produced Henry VI, Parts I, 2, and 3, turning it into a thrilling two-part theatrical event that featured a cast and crew of over a thousand San Diegans and over 50 community-based nonprofits and organizations. The multimedia presentation is followed by a discussion with Katie Harroff, Folger’s Director of Engagement who previously served as Arts Engagement Director at the Old Globe, about their process of inviting communities into the process of adapting and performing Henry 6. The event is Thursday, January 30, at 7:30pm.

We talked to Edelstein on our Shakespeare Unlimited podcast this past summer about the extraordinary project, which also made The Old Globe one of only a handful of theaters in America who have produced all of Shakespeare plays. Read the excerpt below and then listen to the full podcast episode. Barbara Bogaev interviews Edelstein.

BARBARA BOGAEV: Let’s talk about these plays, Henry VI, Part One, Part Two, and Part 3. Remind everybody what that story is, and why they’re so rarely performed.

BARRY EDELSTEIN: Shakespeare wrote basically an eight-play cycle that tells the history of a period of roughly 200 years before his lifetime up till maybe a hundred years before his lifetime. It’s relatively recent history from the point of view of Shakespeare—it would be like an American writer of this moment writing a giant epic about the Civil War.

It covers basically the genesis of the Tudor dynasty. He wrote the latter part of the history first—which are the three Henry VI plays and Richard III—he wrote very early in his career. Then he wrote the earlier part of the history—which is Richard II, Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2, and Henry V—later in his career.

So, there are these two groups of four plays that scholars called the tetralogies—the first tetralogy and the second tetralogy—and all eight of them together tell this absolutely extraordinary story of English history involving foreign conquest, involving civil war in England, involving people usurping the crown, killing other people, involving the legitimacy of rule and the illegitimacy of rule, and it’s this wonderful, complicated, episodic series.

The second tetralogy, Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2, Richard II, and Henry V, are the more famous plays. They come from the more mature pen of William Shakespeare. They are performed more frequently. They’re the ones that have Falstaff in them.

Henry VI—they are just not done a lot. They are Shakespeare’s juvenilia. The writing is more variable than you get in later Shakespeare, although there’s some absolutely stunning set pieces. One of the things about condensing the three plays into two, as I’ve been able to do, is the best writing is the writing that survives, and so I think it really makes a case for the strength and power of these plays. But they’re early plays.

Also, you have to do all three. A theater company can’t just do one because it’s just not satisfying for the audience to get a strange little piece of the whole giant story. And they’re gigantic. I think the three plays together have something like 150 named characters in them.

So, for all those three reasons: the size, the fact that you have to do all three, and the fact that they are very early writing in Shakespeare’s life, they just kind of get ignored.

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BOGAEV: So where did you start with this challenging, long, uneven set of plays?

EDELSTEIN: You know you’re about to climb this giant mountain so here’s what I did. I started by making an outline of all three plays where—in tremendous detail, scene by scene—I basically listed the dramatic events in every scene, here’s what happened. Because I knew that what I needed was to make a story that had two plays in it—the contemporary American theater, you take an intermission—so I was looking for four acts.

BOGAEV: Like a screenplay?

EDELSTEIN: Yeah, and in fact, what I did was I got my hands on some screenwriting software. I went through the plays, and I made a big index card-based outline of every single scene—just saying, “Here’s what happens in this scene.”

Once I had that outline—which is gigantic, because there are, I don’t know, 25 scenes in each one of the three plays, maybe more—I then started moving the index cards around until I had what looked like a narrative arc. I knew early on that the plays had to start with the birth of King Henry VI and end with the death of King Henry VI.

The problem is that Shakespeare’s third play, Henry VI, Part 3, lays all this pipe for the play Richard III. I knew we weren’t going to do Richard III, so I didn’t know how to end because I didn’t quite know how to get rid of all that pipe, that narrative structure, that Shakespeare’s using to get ready for the next play.

Once I had what I thought was a satisfying story then I downloaded the Folger digital text of the plays. God bless the Folger because they have these amazingly well-edited digital versions of all of Shakespeare plays for free and you just download a Microsoft Word file. I started cutting and pasting the Shakespeare text to match my outline—and that’s how I got my first rough draft.

After that it was cutting individual speeches, cutting lines, honing it, shaping it, condensing characters, and eventually, over many, many drafts, I was able to get a story that had two parts. Each of the two parts had two parts within them that had nice big endings at the act breaks and nice big starts at the beginning—and managed to get the story of all three plays into that kind of condensed form.

Every once in a while, I had a hole where I needed to tell some piece of story to cover something that I had cut or to rearrange an action somehow. That’s where I would steal a little language from another Shakespeare or write something in the voice of early Shakespeare to the best of my ability or come up with some piece of stage business that would allow me to narrate for the audience a little piece of action that I didn’t have text to do.

It took me a long time—God, the better part of a year—to get a workable draft before we were able to workshop it with actors. Then I kept on honing it, and honing it, and honing it right up to opening night.

BOGAEV: Well, it is really clear and that is such an accomplishment because to achieve that clarity with such a confusing amount of action in history that we don’t know at all—I mean, Shakespeare’s audience knew this inside and out. Can you give me an example of some bit of stagecraft that you came up with to explain something that you had edited out?

EDELSTEIN: First of all, I knew I needed to get the audience to understand what had happened in the plays before. You need to know that King Henry VI is a child. He’s the son of King Henry V who conquered France. And importantly you need to know that Henry V got to the throne because his father murdered or had murdered Richard II and usurped the crown. Because that anger of Richard II’s descendants about the fact that Henry IV killed Richard II, that is important to understanding the whole sweep of the next two plays. That’s the anger that fuels the Wars of the Roses.

BOGAEV: This is your wonderful opening.

EDELSTEIN: Yeah, I made an opening for the first play where I took a bunch of famous lines from those three plays: so, you know, “For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings,” from Richard II. “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” from Henry IV. “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,” from Henry V.

I have three mannequins on stage, dress dummies. One is dressed as Richard II, one is dressed as Henry IV, and one is dressed as Henry V. We have a little movement sequence where we watch Henry IV take the crown from Richard II and Richard II die. We watch Henry IV bequeath the crown to his son, Henry V, who then conquers France. And then, the baby Henry VI comes in.

BOGAEV: And this is done with actors who come out in black, but they’re wearing these costume gloves, elbow length gloves.

EDELSTEIN: Yeah, the mannequins are sleeveless and the actors provide the arms. Also, wonderfully, because The Old Globe has done all those plays, those costumes are costumes from Old Globe productions of those three plays. We have a warehouse on the other side of town with, you know, 50 years’ worth of costumes and I could just say, “Hey, can we get the costume that Robert Sean Leonard wore when he played Richard II?” and it was there, you know, and we put it on the mannequin to be that part.

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BOGAEV: Tell us about your community program and how you came to use your actors in this way.

EDELSTEIN: It’s one of my favorite parts of the show. The Old Globe, in the time I’ve been here, has developed a program that we call Arts Engagement. We have a really giant program that brings the work of The Old Globe to community-based nonprofits all around San Diego County.

We now, I think, work with about 50 community based nonprofit organizations all up and down San Diego County, which is enormous, and across the border in Tijuana. Most of the populations that we deal with are populations that don’t enjoy regular access to the arts at a big fancy institution like The Old Globe. So we work with refugee populations. We work with veterans’ organizations, and in particular, veterans who are dealing with chronic PTSD or substance abuse issues. We deal with justice involved youth, with seniors. We have a huge network of partners that deal with services to homeless and unhoused populations. We have the country’s biggest program of theater making with incarcerated populations.

It’s now, you know, a two and a half million-dollar annual program that engages something like 30,000 people in San Diego, free of charge. We’ve been doing this for a decade so we have deep, deep relationships in the community.

You know, The Old Globe has sent 27 musicals to Broadway. We’re at the very high end of theater making in this country. And we’re trying to find opportunities, pathways, for our very sophisticated community-based work to be in conversation and in contact with our professional art-making work. This project just seemed the ideal way to bring our artistic work and our community-based work together.

Plus, Shakespeare keeps writing these crowd scenes. There are all these scenes where he will break away from the aristocrats and the power brokers for a moment and check in with the regular people of England who always are being made miserable by the terrible decisions made by the corrupt politicians who run the country.

So, I thought, what better way to merge the community based and the professional work of the Globe than to find ways for those big crowd scenes to actually be played by community members in San Diego? And that’s what we did. We made a little movie studio for a couple of weekends, we brought in about 250 people, and we filmed them saying lines of Shakespeare in these big crowd scenes. “And answer from the king.” And then, we projected them via video onto the show.

We work with a senior center in the historic Black neighborhood of San Diego. We’ve been working with them for 10 years. When Duchess Eleanor summons up some spirits to predict the future, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if these elders at the senior center that we work with were those spirits?” So we filmed them and we project them onto the show.

BOGAEV: I love that part. You really see these beautiful older people’s faces up in tight closeup and very large. They’re just kind of monolithically gorgeous.

EDELSTEIN: They are—and they’re very good at Shakespeare because for 10 years they’ve been participating in workshops with the professionals at the Old Globe. It’s kind of amazing. By the time we opened last weekend, we had over 1,000 community members take direct participation in the making of this show.

It’s just so deeply satisfying to see the transformative impact that Shakespeare has had on the lives of these individuals, but also for us to feel like the work that we’re doing is genuinely connected to the people who live in the city where we’re located.

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BOGAEV: You do really feel the event that you’re trying to make with this Henry 6. In your courtyard of The Old Globe, you’ve created a huge Henry 6 crown and you have a table for families and kids to make roses, red and white roses, to decorate the crown. And there are all sorts of event-like happenings. It felt like something was happening and you were part of something.

EDELSTEIN: I agree because, you know, this is about, “Hey, get involved, experiencing, learn something about Shakespeare. Make a rose. Which side are you going to pick? Red or white? Okay. Choose one.” Then you go watch the story and you feel a kind of stake in one side or the other because you made this rose. This is what I’m talking about. It’s creating an experience, a sense of engagement, so that it’s not just, “I buy my ticket, I sit in the seat. I sit back and I let it wash over me.” But somehow I engage with it in a forward way.

And look, Barbara, I have believed… you know, I’ve been doing this for over 30 years. I came back to the United States after getting my degree in Shakespeare in England with one sense of mission, which is to create something that I thought was an authentically American Shakespeare.

I believe in my whole heart that this writer is the national poet of our country. There is this deep, rich history that goes back to pre-colonial days in America of Shakespeare being at the center of our cultural conversation. Time after time after time we have great figures like Orson Welles, who have done exactly this kind of condensation of a series of Shakespeare plays into this fast, accessible, wonderfully vivid kind of work.

That’s what I’ve wanted to do my entire life. So, this Henry 6 project feels very like a culmination of that, that is a kaleidoscope of ways to look at Shakespeare, ways to experience Shakespeare as something old and something exactly contemporary, as something that you spectate and something that you participate in.

It moves me deeply to watch the fact that it’s impacting people in the way that I had hoped. It feels like a real landmark to me and I’m just deeply proud to be part of it.