miles and riding 100 miles is simply a matter of developing your capacity for suffering. How much can you endure?” His direction to them in this difficult moment? “Increase your capacity for suffering.”
Daniel José Molina + company in Henry V at the Guthrie, directed by Joseph Haj PHOTO DAN NORMAN
mean, that was, you know, it’s a hard thing to watch that.” Building the actors’ concentration is not the only reason that Joe allows observers into the rehearsal room. He also wants staff and board members to see “how fucking hard it is to make anything that is legible, beautiful, smart on stage” and dispel any notions that the work is easy. “I don’t know what it is about our discipline,” he says.
the company that on his first day of tech for Richard II as an actor in 1990, he was deeply frustrated with his elaborate Bagot costume and, after tripping on it for the umpteenth time, shouted his unhappiness into the techdark house. From the back of the room came the voice of costume designer Ann HouldWard: “You have it on backwards.” In 2024, there were cast shifts, set cuts, and a trap that started its downwards
It was a radically different rallying cry than the ones the company had been listening to all week. Not, “Once more…” or “We happy few…” but rather, “Again. And again,” plus suffering. During the rehearsal process, the parallels between Joe and Henry V were clear. Joe described his Hal-like transformation from a teenage slacker who skipped class to go to the beach into a highly disciplined artistic leader with a “huge capacity for work.” In his calm before the first designer run, he looked like Henry reassuring his troops before Agincourt, standing by his chair while actors dodged around the packed room to ask last-minute questions. And there was the question that followed the entire Histories project: “What is one willing to sacrifice to become a person who, for whatever reason, wants to wear that crown?” For a company at the moment of maximum exhaustion, hearing “increase your capacity for suffering” seemed more likely to cause a riot than a return to rehearsal. But the work that Joe had done to create a company that wanted to dig in, that wanted to work hard, that wanted to build a new muscle and use it, paid off. When Tyler heard Joe say “increase your capacity for suffering” he understood [it as]: “I believe in this company to do this, and
I don’t have to make the perfect anything. I don’t have to make the thing nobody’s ever seen. I don’t have to do any of those things. I just have to try to make the thing as beautifully as I know how with these collaborators in this process. JOSEPH HAJ “Nobody—literally zero people—would [say], ‘If I had a violin, I could play for the Philharmonic, I don’t see why not.’ But almost everybody thinks that, ‘If I could just learn all the lines, I too could be an actor.’ Which is absurd. These are artists and there’s a profound artistry and craft involved in that. But everybody thinks they can do it. And when somebody comes and watches a rehearsal where we wrestle with a line sequence, we wrestle with it rhythmically, we wrestle for the sense…it’s eye opening for folks to recognize and realize that this is an art form which requires extraordinary artists working really hard.” That hard work was particularly visible during the Histories tech, an epic process that inevitably included bumps. Joe shared with
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trajectory with a lurch that “revived the dead.” The blood in the blood sword didn’t look “bloody” enough, the fake leek didn’t look “leeky” enough, and the breakable mirror broke. By week 11, after teching and previewing both Richard II and Henry IV, the company was halfway through Henry V—and tired. During notes after one of the previews, Joe returned to his analogy about actors and athletes. He told the company that he was a road biker for many years and described how the endurance required for long rides was similar to that required for the Histories. “You think that the differential between riding 75 or 78 miles and riding 100 miles is a matter of fitness, and it’s not,” Joe told the company. “The difference between riding 75 or 78
that hardship will yield great rewards, and we will come out on the other side of this with a rich and rewarding experience.” “It wasn’t said without generosity. It wasn’t said without compassion,” he remembers, “but it was also said with strength. And with this sort of sense of authority and leadership that we are trying to accomplish something bigger than ourselves. And the capacity to be able to do that is something greater than any one of our bodies can hold at this one point. And yet, we should do it because it’s going to be an incredible thing.” The Histories marathon was built to be exactly that: a marathon. A moonshot attempted precisely because it was hard. Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry V are epic in their intelligence, scale, and ambition and