While finding their seats at the Chain Theatre, the audience was met with music—sometimes ominous, occasionally sublime—from the 16th century, echoing William Byrd’s Ave Verum Corpus with shadings of Claudio Monteverdi. How fitting that we should enter Shakespeare’s theatrical universe through the soundscape of his contemporaries, those lesser mortals who achieved mere competence. At the same time, our Will was busy inventing the human as we know it. In this intimate black box theater on West 36th Street (a location that would have amused the Bard, who knew something about cramped performance spaces), Adriana Alter and her Atlas Shakespeare Company have accomplished something approaching the miraculous. They have breathed urgent, pulsing life into what academic pedants too often dismiss as Shakespeare’s “apprentice work”—as if genius ever truly served an apprenticeship to anyone but itself. ​Why Henry VI Matters: The Anxiety of Influence Before the Influence Shakespeare’s Unfashionable Masterpiece ​ The Henry VI trilogy has long languished in the shadow of Shakespeare’s mature histories, relegated to those academic footnotes where great works go to die a slow death by dissertation. Yet Alter’s company demonstrates with thrilling clarity—and here I must risk the wrath of the Shakespeare establishment—that these early plays contain, in wonderfully unrestrained form, all the psychological penetration and linguistic audacity that would eventually give us Lear’s heath and Hamlet’s Denmark. What some scholars miss, bless their thorough souls, is that apprentice work from a genius is still genius. To witness this production is to observe the divine fire in its first flowering—raw, sometimes ungainly, but unmistakably touched by that cosmic force that separates Shakespeare from every other scribbler who ever presumed to hold a pen. ​The Eternal Return of Political Chaos ​ What makes Henry VI critically relevant to our current carnival of political dysfunction is precisely what made it dangerous in Shakespeare’s time: it is a sustained meditation on the collapse of legitimate authority and the magnificent chaos that ensues when power divorces itself from wisdom. The titular king, portrayed with affecting vulnerability by Ned Bannon, represents something more troubling than mere weakness—he embodies the fundamental absurdity of inherited power in the face of human complexity. Shakespeare, writing at the dawn of his career with that characteristic audacity of youth, was already grappling with questions that would obsess him unto death: What makes a king? What alchemical process transforms order into chaos? How do private ambitions, those delicious little malignancies of the soul, poison the public good? The young dramatist’s genius lay not in offering easy answers—Heaven knows we have enough of those—but in dramatizing their terrible, eternal urgency. ​Performance Excellence: When Actors Become Vessels for Genius The Cast’s Wrestling Match with Immortal Language ​ The sixteen actors of Atlas Company rose magnificently to Shakespeare’s challenge, and what a challenge it is! To speak these lines is to risk everything—failure here is not merely dramatic but cosmic. William Oliver Watkins’s York crackled with the dangerous energy of a man discovering his capacity for evil, that moment when ambition first tastes blood and finds it sweet. Alexander Nero’s Gloucester embodied the tragic nobility of the faithful retainer, a man destroyed not by his vices but by his virtues—surely one of Shakespeare’s cruelest ironies. Charlotte Blacklock’s Margaret revealed the steel beneath surface charm, prefiguring the she-wolf of later plays. Here, we see Shakespeare learning to write women who could devour their enemies with a smile—a skill that would serve him well when creating Lady Macbeth and Goneril. ​The Delicious Corruption of Power When Zachary C. Clark’s Suffolk declares that “Small things make base men proud,” we hear an early articulation of that profound understanding of human vanity that would later produce Iago and Edmund. The bishops’ meddling with royalty is not merely political opportunism but a manifestation of that universal human tendency to confuse personal ambition with divine mission. When Larry Reina’s Winchester schemes against Gloucester, we witness the eternal drama of envy disguised as righteousness—a performance so convincing that even the envious party believes his noble rhetoric. ​Production Design: Visual Poetry in Service of Verbal Genius Costume and Spectacle as Character Nancy Nichols’s costume design immediately transported us into a world of medieval pageantry without sacrificing psychological realism—no mean feat when dealing with Shakespeare’s psychological realism, which tends to make mere historical accuracy seem quaint. The sight of Leah Schwartz’s Joan of Arc, resplendent in armor that caught the light with each gesture, embodied that fierce energy that makes this character one of Shakespeare’s most compelling early creations. Ken Coughlin’s lighting and sound design created an atmosphere of perpetual uncertainty—the ominous rumble of military drums, blazing herald trumpets, the bright flash of steel in combat, and the way shadows fell across conspiratorial faces like moral judgments made visible. Joel Leffert’s fight choreography gave visceral weight to the play’s violence, reminding us that in Shakespeare’s world, political disputes are settled not through reasoned debate (what a quaint notion!) but through the honest brutality of bloodshed. ​The Language of Early Genius: Abundance Before Restraint Shakespeare’s Verbal Gluttony in All Its Glory Perhaps the greatest pleasure of the evening was the opportunity to luxuriate in Shakespeare’s language in its early, untamed form. This is Shakespeare before he learned to restrain his exuberance and discovered that less could be more—though whether this discovery was gain or loss remains delightfully debatable. The result is a fertile abundance of metaphor, simile, and imagery that pleasures in its excess, like a young poet drunk on his first taste of real power over words. When Talbot confesses that his thoughts are “whirled like a potter’s wheel,” we hear the young dramatist discovering metaphor’s power to illuminate psychological states. When Suffolk observes that “Smooth runs the water where the brook is deep,” we witness Shakespeare learning to embed profound truths in deceptively simple language. This skill would make him the most quotable writer in human history. ​The Pithy Wisdom of Compressed Experience The pithy quotes punctuate the evening—”True nobility is exempt from fear,” “Knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven”—remind us why Shakespeare’s language has endured for four centuries while lesser poets moulder in libraries. These are not merely pretty phrases but compressed wisdom, insights into human nature crystallized in memorable form and delivered by actors who understand that Shakespearean language is not ornament but substance. The Director’s Vision: Solving the Unsolvable Adriana Alter’s Theatrical Alchemy Adriana Alter’s expertise shines throughout this adaptation like a beacon in the darkness of contemporary theater. She has solved the considerable problem of condensing three sprawling plays into a single evening without sacrificing narrative coherence or emotional impact—a feat roughly equivalent to performing neurosurgery with a butter knife and making it look effortless. Alter’s script maintains the essential structure of Shakespeare’s original while eliminating the repetitions and digressions that can make the complete trilogy feel unwieldy to modern audiences (we who have been trained by television to expect resolution every twelve minutes). Most importantly, she has preserved that urgent momentum that drives the best history plays—the feeling that events are spiraling toward an inevitable and terrible conclusion, much like the political moments of our collective memories. Contemporary Relevance: The Eternal Return of Human Folly Why These Medieval Kings Speak to Our Modern Chaos What Shakespeare characterizes best in Henry VI are those human flaws that transcend any historical period: the tendency to mistake stubbornness for principle, the ease with which noble intentions justify ignoble actions, and the way personal grievances masquerade as public policy. Sound familiar? These characters speak to us today because they embody timeless patterns of human behavior—patterns we recognize with the uncomfortable shock of looking in a mirror after a sleepless night. The marvelous plots and subplots that Alter’s adaptation preserved—the banishments and curses, the sword fights and murders, the jealousy and contempt—serve not as mere melodramatic ornaments but as external manifestations of internal conflicts. The “backstabbing sycophants” who populate this world are fascinating to watch because they embody, in exaggerated form, tendencies that exist in all of us. Their evil is seductive precisely because it is so thoroughly, recognizably human. Genius Recognized and Celebrated The Birth of English Drama’s Greatest Mind In the end, what makes this production so successful is its recognition that Shakespeare’s early work deserves to be approached not as a historical curiosity or academic exercise but as a living drama. Henry VI plays may lack the perfect architecture of the mature tragedies—they have not yet learned to conceal their scaffolding—but they possess something equally valuable: the raw energy of a great imagination discovering its power. To experience them in the intimate confines of the Chain Theatre, surrounded by actors who understand that Shakespeare’s language is not a museum piece but a vital force capable of illuminating the darkest corners of human experience, is to witness the birth of English drama’s greatest genius. This is Shakespeare in his “full, youthful vigor,” as producer Alexander Nero aptly phrases it, and it is absolutely glorious to behold—even when perhaps especially when it threatens to overwhelm us with its abundant humanity. The Atlas Company has given us a rare chance to see a genius learning to be a genius. We should be grateful, for such opportunities are rarer than honest politicians and more precious than academic tenure. Don’t miss this show, theater lovers and literati! I enjoyed it immensely.