Completing the Canon: Barry Edelstein on The Old Globe's Henry 6

This summer San Diego’s Old Globe became one of only 10 theaters in America who have produced all of Shakespeare’s plays (or 11, depending on how you count it) with their production of Henry 6.

Artistic Director Barry Edelstein shares the details of how they tackled staging Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3—three rarely seen works with more than 150 characters, and condensed it into two exciting nights of theater. The epic production includes contributions from nearly a thousand San Diegans, many of whom have participated in the Globe’s community programs.

He also talks about producing theater in 2024 America at one of the nation’s largest and oldest Shakespeare companies, both the challenges and the exciting opportunities.
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Barry Edelstein, the Erna Finci Viterbi Artistic Director of The Old Globe, is one of America’s most experienced Shakespeare directors and has staged more than half the canon himself. Before joining the Globe in 2012, he directed the Public Theatre’s Shakespeare Initiative and was the artistic director for Classic Stage Company in New York City. He is the author of Thinking Shakespeare about American Shakespearean acting and Bardisms: Shakespeare for All Occasions.

Henry 6 runs through September 14 and 15, 2024 at the Globe in San Diego, California. For tickets and more information, visit www.theoldglobe.org.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published August 13, 2024. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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BARBARA BOGAEV: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Barbara Bogaev.

[Music plays]

BOGAEV: San Diego’s Old Globe has been mounting Shakespeare plays since the 1930s. In fact, by the time Barry Edelstein took over as artistic director in 2012, there were only three plays in Shakespeare’s entire complete works that The Old Globe hadn’t ever staged. So when Edelstein arrived, there was one big item on his to-do list: help The Old Globe complete the canon.

That’s easier said than done. Those last three plays were doozies: Henry VI, Parts I, II, and III. There’s a reason those plays are almost never staged. Actually, several very good reasons. Namely: they’re too expensive, they’re too long, and they’re widely considered among Shakespeare’s most unseasoned works.

But Edelstein’s revised Henry 6 is a revelation. He’s condensed the three plays into two tight, exciting nights of theater with plenty of comedy and action to go around.

[Clip from The Old Globe’s 2024 production of Henry 6. Sofia Jean Gomez is Warwick and Keshav Moodliar is Henry VI.]

WARWICK:
It is reported, mighty sovereign,
That good Duke Humphrey traitorously is murdered
By Suffolk and the Cardinal Beaufort’s means.
The Commons, like an angry hive of bees
That want their leader, scatter up and down
And care not who they sting in his revenge.

HENRY VI:
That he is dead, good Warwick, ’tis too true;
But how he died God knows, not Henry.
Enter his chamber, view his breathless corpse.

BOGAEV: That was Sofia Jean Gomez as Warwick and Keshav Moodliar as King Henry VI in The Old Globe’s production of Henry 6.

Before joining The Old Globe as artistic director, Edelstein directed the Public Theatre’s Shakespeare Initiative and was the artistic director for Classic Stage Company in New York City.

And before this summer, Edelstein had already directed about half of Shakespeare’s plays. Now the Henry VI trilogy adds a few more to his resume. He also teaches Shakespeare. Last time he was on this show, he even taught me a little acting. Or he tried to, anyway…

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BOGAEV: Barry Edelstein, welcome back to Shakespeare Unlimited.

BARRY EDELSTEIN: Terrific to be here. I really appreciate your time.

BOGAEV: So, I looked up who else has completed the canon. In the United States, anyway. I realized it’s a tricky question because not everyone agrees on how many of the plays you need to produce to qualify.

And not to get all like picky about this, but some people say 37. Atlanta includes Edward III. So theirs was 39. These were some of the festivals and theaters that have hit their magic number. But what was your magic number?

EDELSTEIN: Our magic number was 38. We went with 38, and doing these three plays gets us there. Actually, our research, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out who actually had done it, and communicated around the country with people. And you’re right, it’s hard to pin down. We think that we’re either number 10 or 11, but we can’t really be 100 percent sure.

BOGAEV: Yes. And really, who cares? It’s amazing what you’ve done.

EDELSTEIN: Yes, my feelings exactly.

BOGAEV: Exactly. I did wonder when did you realize you were actually going to get there?

EDELSTEIN: Well, I got to The Old Globe about 12 years ago and I saw the list and conspicuous by their absence were the three Henry VI plays. So I knew in the back of my head that that was something I wanted to do. I’ve had a lifelong ambition to direct all of them. I’m now at number 19 as a director, though I’ve produced or dramaturged or taught the rest. It was odd to me that they had never been done. And so, somewhere in the back of my mind, as the Artistic director of The Old Globe, I thought that really is something we should do.

BOGAEV: Okay, so you got it, you’ve gotten it done. Let’s talk about it. Let’s talk about these plays, Henry 6, Part One and Part Two. So just remind everybody what that story is, and why they’re so rarely performed.

EDELSTEIN: Right. So, 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. So 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, sort of, 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. It’s been a real joy to discover them and see audiences discover them as if they’re brand-new plays, even though they’re Shakespeare plays from 400 years ago.

BOGAEV: I can only imagine the budget must have been big for this production though. So how did you even get it off the ground? Did you have big donors or one big donor?

EDELSTEIN: We had one big donor. I should take a minute to acknowledge him because without him this would not possibly have happened. The Old Globe is a 501(c)3 nonprofit. We are supported by a combination of earned income, namely ticket sales, and contributed income, namely philanthropy in various forms—individual philanthropy, corporate, government—you know, like any other nonprofit.

We normally budget our Shakespeares to kind of barely break even. They’re just big plays, you know? In a non-Henry 6 year, we’ll do a cast of 22 or 23, something like that. They’re just enormous plays. Very expensive to produce. Ticket sales cover the bulk of it, but not all of it. So we’re always going to philanthropists to help us out.

The Old Globe is fortunate to be in San Diego, which is an extremely philanthropic community, especially toward the arts. But even that was never going to cover a production of this scope and size.

Enter a man named Roy Cockrum. Roy is a former actor, former Shakespearean actor, and he has an extraordinarily colorful story. He hit the Powerball back in 2014.

BOGAEV: Get out! Wow!

EDELSTEIN: Yeah, true story. As an actor, he always admired the work of the National Theatre in London, and the great European houses, which do these gigantic shows as a matter of course because they enjoy subsidy, state subsidy, which of course the United States just doesn’t have.

So when he won his lottery fortune, he decided to create a foundation whose sole mission is to help theaters do audacious projects. He’s been doing it for 10 years. A few years ago he called me up and he said, “I know the Old Globe, I admire your work, and I wonder if you have anything that you want to do?” And I thought, “Here’s my chance.”

So we put together a proposal to send to Roy and Roy very generously said, “Yeah, I want to help.” His grant made it possible for us to lift this off the ground.

BOGAEV: When did you first read Henry VI?

EDELSTEIN: So I did my graduate degree in Shakespeare at Oxford in the late 1980s. I was a Rhodes Scholar and I went to Oxford and did a master’s degree in Shakespeare.

There was a scholar there named John Wilders, an English Shakespeare don. His claim to fame was that he was the academic advisor to the famous BBC complete works of Shakespeare that they filmed on television in the 1980s. A really wonderful guy.

I was reading Shakespeare’s history plays and he assigned Henry VI, Part 1 which I read then and sort of fell in love with, to tell you the truth.

I loved the thing in Henry VI, Part 1—you feel this young playwright trying to make a mark—so the writing is very daredevil-ish, right? Shakespeare will have a battle scene and juxtapose it with a love scene and juxtapose that with a crazy, sexy party scene and then juxtapose that with some big political rhetoric—and then suddenly these witches turn up. So he’s like kind of throwing everything at the wall. There’s a kind of, “Look at me, show off my talent” about it.

I was a young artist at the time reading it and I just felt, “Oh, there’s something audacious and beguiling about this play that I really, really loved” and thought, “I want to do this play someday.”

BOGAEV: And that’s what you mean by variable. I mean, really, they’re often called uneven. So where did you start with this challenging, long, uneven set of plays?

EDELSTEIN: It’s a great question. 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 which uses, you know, this famous technique in screenwriting:  you write action down on index cards. In the old days, you pinned the index cards on the wall, and as you’re writing your script, you would just take an index card and move it from here over to there as you were rearranging the dramatic action of the screenplay.

Now, there’s software that you can use which basically makes these index cards so that’s what I did. I went through the plays, and I made a big outline, 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.

So this index card technique allowed me to do it. Once I had what I thought was a satisfying story then I downloaded the Folger digital text of the play. God bless the Folger Shakespeare Library because they have these amazingly well-edited digital versions of all of Shakespeare plays for free and you just download a Microsoft Word file.

Then 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. It took me… 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.

EDELSTEIN: I think so, yeah.

BOGAEV: So that really is to your credit. 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: Yeah. 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. Right, it’s fantastic. 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.

BOGAEV: You know, another thing you did really well, you—first of all, you bring a lot of comedy to these plays not known for laughs and you do a great job of balancing comedy and tragedy in them.

Just to give people an idea, they’re just a lot of jokes and slapstick physical humor. For instance, the Cardinal plays his villainy for laughs many times in part one and the character Talbot, a great warrior of England, has some fun trying not to hit on the Duke of Burgundy, who’s played by a woman. King Henry is—when we meet him at least—he’s this funny kind of baby skater bro who says things like, “That was awesome.” And York gives this hilarious PowerPoint on why he is the rightful heir to the throne. And that’s just a few.

EDELSTEIN: Well, part of being a stage director is putting on a show and, you know, you have to entertain people and make it entertaining. The truth is the plays can be kind of sober, and serious, and a little heavy, and frankly at times, a little airless, and that’s no fun. You’re sitting outside in San Diego under a beautiful night sky, and it wants to be as enjoyable an experience as it can. But that’s all kind of, “Oh, yeah, that’s how you direct a play. That’s how you put on a show.”

The bigger idea that I think’s provocative in these early Shakespeare plays is that he just didn’t care about consistency of tone. People made fun of him at the time for mixing across social classes and mixing across genres, but he didn’t care.

In our production are two actors of Indian extraction, Mahira Kakkar, who plays Duchess Eleanor in some other parts, and Keshav Moodliar, who plays King Henry. The first time we ran part 1, both of them said to me, “This is like a Bollywood movie.” And they’re absolutely right! Bollywood movies don’t care about mixing tone. There’ll be a dance scene, and a musical number, and then a bloody fight, and then a love scene, and then some kind of political something, just back-to-back, and that’s just how you do it.

BOGAEV: It’s what makes them great.

EDELSTEIN: It’s what makes them so beguiling. I mean, they’re watched by billions of cultures around the world.  We have this kind of post-Victorian idea that tone needs to be consistent and that genre needs to be consistent. So, we do have narrative forms that kind of mix in a little bit of humor with a little bit of drama in that way. But not in the way that Shakespeare does. He does these swerving turns, just turns on a dime, and I thought, “That’s great.” It’s outdoors, it’s big and broad and it’s got an operatic kind of scale.

As to the PowerPoint, you know, I defy anybody to sit through that speech. If York is just standing there, there’s a long speech where York narrates his legal claim to the throne, which goes back generations and talks about the matrilineal inheritance.

BOGAEV: I was dreading it, frankly.

EDELSTEIN: I know. It’s just—you just think, “Oh my god, how can I ask an audience to go through that?”

I thought, “The guy is a little bit megalomaniacal. He’s a little crazy. He has locked himself into his basement, pouring through history books, and coming up with this incredibly Byzantine, strange, complicated set of claims for why it is that he should be king.” I thought, “Well, of course what he would do is he would make a little slideshow out of it.” It’s delightful. It comes at a point in the story right before stuff is going to get really, really bloody and violent, and it’s nice to just give the audience a little break.

BOGAEV: I want to talk about the set because it really helps to make this a dynamic production. To describe it, it’s these two separate scaffold type movable castles, and you have lots of columns that serve as video projection screens. You project things like the Henry 6 logo, and video of, say, flowers or a forest if it’s in the forest or smoke for battles. It’s especially effective for the burning of Joan of Arc at the stake—the whole set goes up in flames, video of flames.

So, what kind of conversations led to creating this kind of dynamic set, and did you have a model for how to do it? Because a lot of theaters use video projections, some better than and some worse.

EDELSTEIN: Video is now becoming really a regular feature of work on the American stage.

What’s wonderful about The Old Globe, which is one of the great theaters in the country—we’re the largest nonprofit theater outside of New York City—is that we can attract really high-level talent to come and work here. Not just on stage—Tally Sessions and Elizabeth Davis are Broadway performers—but offstage as well.

I put together a really wonderful team of incredibly high-level designers. Lawrence Moten is the set designer. David Israel Reynoso, who was just nominated for a Tony award, is the costume designer. Kate Hefner is the video designer.

Kate was the one who brought in this idea. I said, “You know, I’d love to be able to do video,” because we wanted to get these community members projected into the show, which I’m sure we’ll talk about. And Kate said, “No, let me bring in these LED panels and then that will be able to get us from a cathedral, to a forest, to an explosion to a fire, to somebody’s basement in a very quick and wonderful way.”

It was just this really, sort of, yearlong process of inventing a visual approach to these two giant plays.

BOGAEV: It’s also really dynamic. You use the screens, the columns on the scaffolding and other actual screens, that you kind of creatively come up with to project video that you’ve taped of your community actors. So first, 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. Part of what we’re trying to do institutionally is bring that community-based work closer to the center of our organization which means finding ways to put it in communication with our professional art making.

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.

BOGAEV: I love that. I am thinking —it’s always a big question—how much you reference current events in a Shakespeare production. These plays, as you said, are very much about power and what happens when leaders hang on to power, and fight over it, and justify their will to power with an ideology or a nationalistic view. That all carries a lot of resonance right now for Americans.

EDELSTEIN: [teasing] What makes you say that, Barbara?

BOGAEV: You did make the choice to reference modern times.  I’ll just give one example—there are many— your Jack Cade, the populist leader in your Part 2 is very pointedly modeled after the QAnon Shaman, the January 6th insurrectionist who had face paint and was bare chested and wore a furry hat with horns, That’s how Jack Cade is. That’s his costume. His face paint is the British flag.

So what kind of conversations did you have about all of this—about your production referencing very obvious moments in current history and how subjective or objective to be about modern-day politics?

EDELSTEIN: Well, Shakespeare always seems to have this knack of having gotten there before you.

When Sir John Talbot dies, there’s nobody left alive who has a bigger idea about England and the nation and what it means and the values that drive it. They’re only after power as an end in itself. Power to glorify themselves, power to make themselves more important and more influential.

It seems to me, what the plays are arguing, what all three of Shakespeare’s plays are arguing, is that in a politics that is divorced from values can only lead to violence.

That’s what Shakespeare’s point seems to be. He dramatizes this with Jack Cade’s Rebellion—it’s in the second of the three plays and it’s at the beginning of our second play—which is this kind of ragtag rabble of people.

It’s very clear in Shakespeare’s text—and this is not me manipulating it, it’s very clear in Shakespeare’s text— they’re anti-intellectual. They hate the government. They believe that the elites are the biggest threat to the country and that working people should have more power because the elites are rotten and corrupt. That’s all Shakespeare’s language.

They go and storm the capitol, that’s what happens in the play. Now, I should refer here to no less an eminence than Stephen Greenblatt, who I know you know, Barbara, and have had on your podcast. He wrote a book called Tyrant, where he makes the case that the Jack Cade Rebellion is exactly the kind of right wing, authoritarian, populist movement that we’re seeing at this moment crop up all around the world, in countries all around the world, and not just in the United States.

So to me, it just seemed the obvious way to depict Jack Cade. What are you going to do with that scene? How are you going to do that scene? Even if you don’t put him in a shaman outfit with horns, you’re going to think about January 6th. There’s just no way that’s not going to be there. So I thought, “Well, I got to do it. I just got to talk about that stuff flat out. Let Shakespeare’s view about it be heard.”

I want to use my art to sort of give audiences a provocative chance to think about it. So you know, I was nervous about how people would react. It is done in a spirit of comedy because Jack Cade is basically a comic character.

BOGAEV: He’s very funny.

EDELSTEIN: Yeah, very funny. So you know, we kinda get away with it.

BOGAEV: What kind of reaction have you gotten?

EDELSTEIN: Mostly extremely positive. I think most people seem to really appreciate it and kind of boggle at how amazingly accurate Shakespeare seems to have been about precisely what we’re living through at the moment.

It also helps that that Tally Sessions who plays Jack Cade, and also John Talbot, is just a stunningly charismatic figure. He is so winning that he kind of automatically pulls you onto his side, which is equally chilling. But you know, it has this wonderful sort of jolt of electricity. I love that in the theater because—the one thing that happens is people laugh, but there’s another sense in the crowd of, “Oh my god, I can’t believe they’re doing that”—which is alive and electric and that’s what theater should be.

BOGAEV: You know, I’m thinking that theater is still picking up the pieces from the pandemic. I didn’t feel that when I was sitting in your very full opening night audience. But how much do you still feel the pandemic slow down and what do you imagine for the future?

EDELSTEIN: We’re still coming back. We are close to 2019 numbers for single ticket sales. That is non subscription tickets. We’re pretty much back to where we were in 2019.

But subscriptions are still way, way down. You know, at the worst point, they were about 40 percent down, now we’re sort of picking up again. Because the subscription audience has just changed its taste after two and a half years of staying home, it was hard to get them back out, getting them to commit way in advance to four or five shows is just hard.

But the biggest issue is that costs have skyrocketed. Production costs are up about 30 percent and non-production costs are up somewhere between 30 and 40 percent. So that’s labor costs and materials costs, shipping costs, housing in San Diego for out-of-town artists, utilities and gas. I mean, the cost structure has just gone bananas. As every American knows, the pandemic period and the post-pandemic period, things just got enormously expensive very, very fast.

So when you’re in a situation where revenue is either flat or declining and costs are skyrocketing, you face a budget gap of some size. There’s now a kind of very difficult to bridge deficit that’s just baked into the structure as we try and figure out how to address these rising costs.

Theaters around the country are dealing with this in different ways. One way that we’re seeing, sadly, is by people cutting back. If you do fewer shows, it’s not going to cost as much, but that becomes this kind of cycle where now you’re not doing enough work to excite philanthropists. You’re not doing enough work to excite new audiences. And so cutting back seems to sort of start this spiral that just leads to more, and more, and more, and more contraction. So much so that we’re starting to see nonprofits around the United States just close their doors.

So the other way to do it is to focus on the revenue side. See if you can raise more money. See if philanthropy can help close that gap. There’s a lot of talk about a second round of federal relief during the pandemic. There was the shuttered venue operators grant. Now there’s talk about something called the Stage Act, which would once again sort of let loose a cascade of federal funding to help us close this gap.

And then we’re also trying to do programming that seems to galvanize the community in new ways. And something like Henry 6 fits in that box. You know, this thing is an event and it’s being treated as an event.

So when that happens, it makes audiences feel like, “I got to be there or I’m going to miss out.” Trying to deliver something that’s not just a passive way of experiencing a story, but is actually an engaging and experiential way of going to the theater is what I think the field is looking at.

So, you know, I’m cautiously optimistic that we’re still doing something in the theater that is incredibly unique,  that can’t be found on television or in film. It has survived far worse than a temporary pandemic. On the other hand, I am concerned that until we find a way to fill in this very serious structural deficit, we have a kind of sword of Damocles hanging over the field that is worrisome.

BOGAEV: Well, you do really feel the event that you’re trying to make with this Henry 6 just, you know, in your courtyard of The Old Globe. It’s three theaters where people who have never been there. 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 the 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.

I feel like I’m part of a long continuum of artists who are saying that there is an energy to Shakespeare that is very specifically and very idiosyncratically American, and that touching Shakespeare for American audiences can create a kind of exhilaration and a kind of sense of possibility that really very few other cultural forces can. 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.

BOGAEV: Well, congratulations again and thank you so much for this and for the productions.

EDELSTEIN: Well, Barbara, you know, Barbara, I’m such a fan of the podcast. It’s just a real thrill for me to be on it again. Thanks.

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BOGAEV: That was Barry Edelstein, artistic director of the Old Globe in San Diego. Henry 6, Parts One and Two run at the Old Globe until September 14th and 15th. Check out theoldglobe.org for tickets and more information.

You can hear more from Barry Edelstein on his podcast, “Where There’s a Will.” It’s really great.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña and Leonor Fernandez. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

If you’re a fan of Shakespeare Unlimited, please do leave us a review on your podcast platform of choice. It helps others find the show.

Shakespeare Unlimited comes to you from the Folger Shakespeare Library. Home to the world’s largest Shakespeare collection, the Folger is dedicated to advancing knowledge and the arts.

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Thanks for listening.