Word: staging
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...program note, Kahn says: "The play is set on a stage which is a playground which is an arena which is a battlefield. The games of this play are the games of war, of conquest, of territory, of power, of betrayal, and of love--games played every day in the playground--and the space is transformed, as the playground is, into whatever or whatever the players want it to be." The trouble with this is that the Elizabethans did not regard these things as "games", as mere make-believe; these things were the very stuff of history and the very...
...keeping, with Kahn's playground concept, Karl Eigsti has designed a large frame with a tall swing suspended at the stage-right side and a sort of jungle-gym at stage-left. Then there are some red mental barrels, used now to sit on, now to pound on, now to warm cold hands over...
Some twenty minutes or so before the play itself begins, members of the company gradually come on stage--dressed mostly in well-worn tee-shirts and dungarees--and use the area purely as a playground. These young people--about a fifth of them Negro--dribble and pass basketballs, throw Frisbees (unusually skillfully, too), play with hula-hoops, spar and wrestle, do gymnastics, shinny up and down the swing ropes, and hang by their heels from the top of the stage. Some of them make rhythms with a tambourine, rattle, triangle, maracus, and a pair of claves. Eventually there are some...
...with a field of corpses, he slowly wanders about, deeply, shaken and unhardened by his hands. Espying the approach of two enemy French soldiers, he scampers up the jungle-gym. But the soldiers pursue and overtake him, coldly spear him, and depart leaving one more corpse on the silent stage. None of this is specified, but it is deeply affecting...
...Kahn's most memorable scene is still to come, when Henry is handed the list of "the names of those their nobles that lie dead." As he recites the long roster, name by name, a score of men gradually come on stage each wearing a ghostly white mask splotched with fresh blood. Finally the King intones the incipit of a Te Deum, and the ghostly choir picks it up in unison and, in the manner of the Living Theatre, moves down-stage to face the audience in a long row, humming and swaying from left to right--an inspired fusion...