Bland Bard Henry Iv, Part

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

The American stage community cherishes a persistent dream: the creation of an equivalent to Britain's National Theater or Royal Shakespeare Company. New plays would be mounted and the classics reconsidered in an environment sheltered from the hit-or-extinction extremities of Broadway. Over the decades attempts have been made, with varying degrees of success, at New York City's Lincoln Center and Public Theater and at regional companies including the Guthrie in Minneapolis, the Yale Repertory Theater and Robert Brustein's American Repertory Theater at Harvard. Last week the newest candidate took center stage. The American National Theater, headed by Peter Sellars, 27, opened at Washington's Kennedy Center with a less than wondrous Henry IV, Part I by that "American," William Shakespeare. Sellars' rationale for starting with an Elizabethan masterwork rather than, say, a Eugene O'Neill tragedy is to rediscover the plays and grandiloquent production styles that were popular at the dawning of the modern American theater. Indeed, the next show, which he will direct, is The Count of Monte Cristo, a French romantic drama that O'Neill's father, Actor James, toured in for years across the U.S. ^

Sellars is celebrated for controversial reworking of revered texts. But his new theater's premiere, directed by Timothy Mayer, is if anything too faithful and tame. Shakespeare's play depicts a civil war brought about by a usurper King and the self-serving pretenders to his throne. Some productions emphasize the martial valor of the King's ablest rival, Hotspur; others exult in the merriment and dissipation of the Prince of Wales' favorite companion, Falstaff. The closest that Mayer comes to taking a point of view is to underline the play's presumption that history is made by men, not social forces: he ends many scenes with one or two figures frozen in silhouette. The acting is mostly serviceable, with three happy exceptions: John Heard as Prince Hal is unmistakably regal even in his giddiest antics; Bruce McGill rockets with energy as Hotspur; and John McMartin proves imperiously perfect as King Henry IV but insufficiently charismatic, if cunning, as Falstaff. W.A.H. III