Cast Set For HENRY IV at Theatre For a New Audience

Henry IV will open at Theatre For a New Audience this month, with performances running January 26 - March 2 at Polonsky Shakespeare Center.

The full company is William Bednar (Musician/Traveler/Messenger/Servant), Jordan Bellow (Ned Poins/Prince John/Feeble), Steven Epp (Earl of Worcester/Francis/Silence), Nigel Gore (Earl of Warwick/Sir Richard Vernon), Slate Holmgren (Nym/Sheriff/Mouldy/Earl of Douglas), Elijah Jones (Prince Henry (Hal)), PJ Ju (Musician/Traveler/Messenger), John Keating (Earl of Westmoreland/Robert Shallow), Owen Laheen (Lady Mortimer/Traveler/Servant to Hotspur/Davy/Messenger/Page), Dakin Matthews (King Henry IV/Traveler), Cara Ricketts (Lady Percy/Doll Tearsheet), Michael Rogers (Earl of Northumberland/Owen Glendower/Bullcalf), Jay O. Sanders (Sir John Falstaff), Sandra Shipley (Mistress Quickly/Lady Northumberland/Archbishop of York), James Udom (Henry Percy (Hotspur)/Pistol), and Elan Zafir (Bardolph/Edmund Mortimer/Lord Hastings).

Henry IV, Part One is one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays, but Henry IV, Part Two is rarely produced. Dakin Matthews has taken Henry IV, Part One and Part Two and adapted them into one three-act play of 3:45 including two intermissions, creating one play approximately half the length of the two separately.

With vivid, indelible characters, the Adaptation is gripping and epic, exploring timeless questions about legitimate authority and how the private lives of rulers conflict with their public lives. When the play begins, King Henry IV, has taken the throne from his cousin Richard. Henry is plagued by guilt and challenged by a rebellion led by the brave Henry Percy (Hotspur). Prince Hal, King Henry’s son, is alienated from his father and, rather than assuming the duties of the heir apparent, spends his time in a tavern with the old knight Falstaff, an outlaw, liar, and great wit with insatiable appetites.

Matthews writes “The two plays are one in conception…(and) together tell of the transition of power from father to son. Hal’s growth … and the choices he must make on the way to becoming Henry V, organize the entire action…It is the story of a man becoming a king.  Simultaneously, it is the story of a boy becoming a man, and of a son disappointing, surprising, frustrating, pleasing, and ultimately outgrowing his own father.”

Emma Smith, Shakespeare scholar and author, observes Henry IV is also "deeply concerned with real and imagined relationships between fathers and sons. There’s Northumberland and his son Hotspur as well as King Henry and his son Hal. But when King Henry wishes, at the outset of the play, that the brave Hotspur were really his so… his wish for an alternative son legitimates Hal’s own wish for an alternative father.”

Henry IV introduces Falstaff, one of Shakespeare’s most compelling creations. Harold Bloom describes Falstaff as “the most intelligent person in all of literature” and also says of him, “Falstaff is life!”    

Elijah Jones as Prince Henry (Hal), Dakin Matthews as King Henry IV, Cara Ricketts as Lady Percy, Jay O. Sanders as Sir John Falstaff, and James Udom as Henry Percy (Hotspur) lead this cast of sixteen.

Henry IV Parts i and ii adapted by Dakin Matthews into a single play are the thirty-fourth and thirty-fifth plays by William Shakespeare in his thirty-eight-play canon which TFANA has produced. 

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