REVIEW 'Rose Rage' creates an epic journey

The marathon production depicts three of Shakespeare's plays.
By JUSTIN GLANVILLE
ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW YORK -- There's a 75-minute dinner break in the middle of "Rose Rage," a 51/2-hour distillation of Shakespeare's three plays about Henry VI -- but theatergoers may not be able to stomach anything too heavy.
Right before the break, the ambitious Duke of York (played by Bruce A. Young) grabs a mound of actual, raw beef -- complete with dangling entrails -- and holds it aloft.
Technical problems sometimes arise.
"We're all standing around him, and at [one] performance, when he flipped that meat up, I looked up, and this big glob of meat juice landed in my eye," said Jay Whittaker, who plays Richard, Duke of Gloucester.
Such are the occupational hazards of acting in this marathon production, which is set in a slaughterhouse and uses the slicing and hacking of real meat and cabbage as a metaphor for the play's rampant violence.
But don't mistake "Rose Rage" for a gimmicky, "Gallagher"-esque dumbing down of the Bard. It has been almost universally praised in its two prior incarnations -- first in London and then in Chicago. The New York production, which runs through Oct. 17 at the Duke on 42nd Street, is a restaging of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater's version.
In a Sept. 20 review, The Associated Press called it "an epic of staggering theatricality," offering a "straightforward, clear-headed condensation" of three of Shakespeare's most challenging history plays. And The Wall Street Journal, reviewing the play in Chicago, called it a "thrilling" affair that could "ply Broadway just as it is."
Affects the audience
Though nearly six hours of Shakespeare -- condensed or otherwise -- would seem a hard sell, the creators of "Rage" said they never doubted audiences would connect with the material.
Barbara Gaines, head of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, said she had been emboldened by once seeing an English Shakespeare company perform nearly all of Shakespeare's history plays back-to-back -- an epic event that lasted eight hours.
"It was wild and wonderful, and it was very popular and selling out," she said. "When something is that long, it becomes less about theater and more an event you go on -- this journey with all these people you don't know -- and at the end, you feel you know the actors and the people around you."
Director and co-adapter Edward Hall said the production had arrived in New York at a timely moment, on the heels of the Republican National Convention and in the midst of a presidential election campaign.
"They're plays about civil war and the hypocrisy of politicians, and audiences take those issues very seriously, I've found," he said. "You get to see how duplicitous people become when they're trying to gain power. The last person you should trust is a politician."
His decision to combine the three "Henry VI" plays was spurred by practical, rather than artistic, considerations. Because of budget constraints, he couldn't afford to stage full productions of all three -- which, at a total running time of nine hours, would have presented scheduling problems, too.
When the trimming was done, nearly 50 percent of Shakespeare's original text had been excised -- mostly from the first two plays, which are believed to be earlier (and less masterful) than the third. Gaines and Hall said the cutting gave greater clarity to the original material, which contains meandering digressions about Joan of Arc and French history.