Experimental theater modernizes Shakespeare

Imagine William Shakespeare’s timeless stories infused with a touch of today’s overly dramatic television shows. That’s the approach director and UB faculty member Danielle Rosvally is taking with “Henry VI, Part II,” the next production in the Department of Theatre and Dance’s spring season.

Advertised as part “Real Housewives” and part “Game of Thrones,” Rosvally says the show also contains an underlying cloak-and-dagger theme.

“I’ve been wanting to direct ‘Henry VI, Part II’ for a very long time,” she explains. “It is an amazing show, and it’s got so many incredible, cool things. It’s got some really kick-ass parts for women and a bunch of fight scenes. We’re calling it ‘Real Housewives’ meets this spy espionage feel, and there’s a populist rebellion, which I’ve been thinking a lot about in the wake of Jan. 6, 2021. So that’s been on my mind for a long time.”

If the fighting and drama aren’t enticing enough, Rosvally is also introducing an Original Practice experiment. Original Practice (or “OP”) attempts to mimic certain historical production conditions to better understand how shows looked, sounded and felt in Shakespeare’s time.

Rosvally, an assistant professor of theatre and dance who has more than 20 years’ experience as an actor and fight director, says Elizabethan actors worked under incredibly tight time constraints — sometimes with only four days of rehearsal. Her production will experiment with the possibilities of spontaneity and improvisation using Shakespeare’s text as the base. To bring this cinematically scaled history to life, UB’s actors, a couple of whom are equity actors, will play between four and six roles each. Each actor will be cast in two tracks, and before every performance, a coin flip will determine which track they play that evening.

“Since we only have two shows (on April 5 and 6), which isn’t a lot, I wanted to turn those into a useful learning experience for my cast,” Rosvally says. “And this is my modern take on what an OP script relationship might have looked like.”

As another learning component, Rosvally is introducing a form of improv.

“None of the actors have the full script. My assistant director, Ian Downes, is going to be on stage with the cast as the prompter and he’ll have a table where he has the full script in front of him,” she says. “He’ll also be using a little bell to ask the actors to launch into an improvisational situation with some kind of prompt to help explain to the audience what’s going on. Because we have such a short rehearsal period, we are not necessarily doing the deep textual lift that I would do with a full production. So there are complicated things in this history that the audience should know in order to understand what's happening.”

Henry VI actually refers to three separate plays written by Shakespeare, all chronicling the life of King Henry VI of England and the War of the Roses. Overall, Henry VI is a historical drama depicting a period of political instability and civil war in England. It explores themes of power, leadership, family conflict and the devastating consequences of war.

In Part II specifically, King Henry marries Margaret of Anjou, the English court begins to question Henry’s leadership and divides its support between the houses of Lancaster (Henry) and York. Margaret plots with her secret lover Suffolk, the Duke of York, who leads a rebellion, and the War of the Roses begins.

“I think anyone who is remotely interested should come and see it because it’s not a show that people have likely seen performed before,” Rosvally says. “And it’s also not a show that they’re likely to see performed again unless they really go out of their way.

“My cast even had a little bit of an issue because some of them wanted to watch a production just to get into it and they were having trouble finding a video production — and that’s with the entire Internet at their disposal. So it’s just an obscure show.”

Rosvally is documenting her behind-the-scenes process on TikTok. These videos feature the cast and crew, and even some “hot takes” on Shakespeare. When asked what Rosvally’s “hot take” on Shakespeare is, she says that every person needs to know something about Shakespeare.

“They don’t have to be an expert, but they need to know something about Shakespeare, otherwise they are relinquishing knowledge of their own culture,” she says. “And this is because of how deeply embedded Shakespeare is into our cultural languages and cultural capital, particularly in the West. We quote Shakespeare all the time. You probably don't even know you’re doing it.

“There are allusions to famous Shakespeare stories and movies, music and books basically spanning across popular culture,” she adds. “And if a person is to make any sense of this, they need to have a passing knowledge of Shakespeare, so we cannot simply stop studying him just because he is dead.”

The production will take place at 7:30 p.m. April 5 and 6 in the Arts Rehearsal Workshop (B-83) in the Center for the Arts.

Tickets are $22 for general admission; $17 for UB employees, seniors and veterans; $7 for UB students; and $12 for students from other schools. Tickets may be purchased through Ticketmaster or at the Center for the Arts box office Center from noon to 6 p.m. Wednesday through Friday.