Joan of Arc

Henry VI, Part 1, is one of Shakespeare’s least-performed plays. This is perhaps partly because of its odd structure: in a play ostensibly about the English king Henry VI, over half the play takes place in France, dealing with Joan of Arc’s struggle to free her country from the English occupation, toggling back and forth between Joan in France and the wrangling in the English court which continues in Parts 2 and 3. Joan never interacts with Henry, and is never mentioned in the other two plays; even when the Henry VI plays are performed, the scenes set in France are usually sensibly trimmed. After all, if the tripartite Henry VI plays are to work at all, what is Joan doing in them?

What makes Shakespeare’s history plays unique – and what continues to attract me to them – is his insistence on including the bits that the “official” histories would leave out. And so I thought: what if I continued that impulse, and refocused this unwieldy play on the character who is so clearly straining to be its protagonist? Maybe the problem wasn’t that this character was too central a focus in a play that wasn’t about her; maybe she needed a play of her own. 

So this play is a cut, rearranged, and newly imagined version of Henry VI, Part One. All the text is from the original, and all the characters are Shakespeare’s – we’ve just excavated them, giving them center stage for the first time. As always with Shakespeare, he is more interested in questions than in answers, in the personal than the abstract, and in the human than the symbol. He interrogates the genre of the history play even while writing one, considering how the way we tell history affects the way we live it. Because of his national and chronological perspectives, Shakespeare wrote a version of Joan very unlike the one we might know from history (or Shaw): this Joan is not a saint, nor is she terribly interested in being one. Instead, she is (as the best Shakespeare characters are) vibrantly human, calling out to be embodied and brought to life. 

Set by Sydney Garick
Costumes by Alyssa Korol
Lighting by Ezra Garey Levine
Photos by Nina Goodheart