on day one, but it happened,” says Tyler Michaels King, who played Richard II. “It set a standard for, ‘We’re here to get this massive amount of work done.’ Because we know we don’t have enough time.”
Charles Newell + Garland Wright, co-directors of Shakespeare’s History Plays at the Guthrie in 1990 PHOTO MICHAL DANIEL
be his third Richard II, third Henry IV, and sixth Henry V as an actor or director. That familiarity armed him with “an accumulated knowledge of where the cul-de-sacs are. Where it’s like, ‘Wow, we spun out in that thing, and I had the actors in that space for three weeks before I realized there’s no there there and had to bring them back.’” With only eight weeks of rehearsal before tech, there simply wasn’t time to get lost. Joseph Haj in the History Plays at the Guthrie in 1990 PHOTO MICHAL DANIEL
“Their themes center on leadership, and the cost of leadership. Themes about our overweening ambitions and what trouble our pesky egos can get us into. These are things that are always true, always relevant, always conditions of being human. Ambition at what price? Ambition at what cost, to myself or to others? What is one willing to sacrifice to become a person who, for whatever reason, wants to wear that crown?” Although the 1990 History Plays were codirected (and Joe had previously co-directed Henry IV and Henry V with Mike Donahue at PlayMakers Rep, where Joe served as Producing Artistic Director), he decided to lead the 2024 Histories solo with a team of associate and assistant directors. Joe developed his strong opinions through long experience. His first directing job was Henry V with inmates in a maximum-security prison. The 2024 Guthrie Histories would
24 SDC JOURNAL | FALL 2024
“If I hadn’t worked with Joe before, I wouldn’t think we could do it,” says Tree, who first worked with Joe at the Guthrie on King Lear in 2017. She initially built his schedules the way she had for all other directors she’d worked with in her 30+ year career: Joe would tell her that he needed an hour of rehearsal time, and she would allow for slightly more because “most directors end up using more time.” But Joe kept strictly to schedule, and Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry V were each staged in a week. Joe found actors who could work that quickly “by bringing in the people he knows and loves, and really vetting people who he didn’t know,” says Tree. Almost everyone in the Histories cast had either previously worked with Joe or in classical rotating repertory. The actors who were in the room understood the assignment. “Joe did not ask for 80 percent of the actors showing up off book
According to Tyler, “It was implicitly said that, ‘We are going to do this work in the room, and it is not going to be enough time to make it a great show, so you have to work on this outside of the room.’” Voice and text coach Sara Becker, as well as the one associate and two assistant directors were available to the actors for that work. “I felt that Joe trusted me to go and do that work with other people and hold the central conceit of what he’s shooting for…and then bring it back and get more heightened and more specific because I had more fully understood it,” Tyler says. “Joe allowing the permission for that to happen is a huge success…If he had been more grippy on the whole thing, I don’t think we would have gotten as rich of an experience.” Because so many in the company arrived with their lines memorized, line notes were emailed out starting the first week of rehearsals and continued through previews. Not everyone was a fan of such a long period of notes. One actor called the stage manager down to their dressing room before a preview “to express their displeasure with the idea that they’re getting notes about lines at this point in the game, when they know they got the line wrong.” Joe’s credo, as Tyler interprets it, is: “The words are the words, and we present these words as beautifully as possible.” In his rehearsals, “you can walk around and kind of do anything you want to on stage. But if the language is unclear, he’s gonna check you on it.” Joe’s insistence on textual fidelity and clarity starts during table work. The eight weeks of rehearsal for the Histories began with a week of table work on all three plays that “really set the expectations of what world we’re trying to build together…because it was about the language, it was about the character relationships, it was about the dramaturgy of the language on the page, and how we must clearly express that,” says Tyler. Histories and Guthrie dramaturg Carla Steen agrees: “One of the things that I think Joe is very, very good at is understanding the text and presenting it as clearly as possible.” Clarity was particularly important for the three-play marathon of the Histories. Richard II starts mid-argument with gauntlets and accusations flying. “If we don’t get this thing, the central argument into the room,