Summary 
A brilliantly realized metaphor - the 15th century War of the Roses depicted by an all-male ensemble of twelve actors within the studio-space confines of a modern slaughterhouse - in an American premiere of a consolidation of Shakespeare's three Henry VI historical plays. Superbly directed with stunning choreography of animal butchery, visceral sound effects, and a bravura ensemble energetically inhabiting more than thirty roles, in a five-and-a-half-hour theatrical triumph.
Design
Directed by Edward Hall. Adapted by Edward Hall and Roger Warren. Designed by Michael Pavelka. Lights by Ben Ormerod. Musical direction and arrangements by Simon Slater. Properties by Pamela Parker.
Cast
Jason Denuszek (General/Prince Edward), Will Dickerson (Somerset/Rutland/Lady Elizabeth Grey), Joe Forbrich (Warwick/Jack Cade), Sean Fortunato (Humphrey/Young Clifford/Rivers), Chris Genebach (Winchester/Saye/Cliffford), Timothy Gregory (Suffolk/Dick the Butcher/Clarence), Carmen Lacivata (King Henry VI/Talbot/Lady Bona), Fletcher McTaggart (Talbot/Smith the Weaver/King Edward IV), Mark L. Montgomery (Exeter), Scott Parkinson (Queen Margaret/Vernon), Jay Whittaker (Bassett/Richard/Clerk of Chatham), Bruce A. Young (York/Stafford/A Father/King Louis XI).
Analysis
Edward Hall, son of Royal Shakespeare Company founder Peter Hall, makes his U.S. directorial debut with Rose Rage, an epic adaptation of the entire Henry VI trilogy. Hall and co-adapter Roger Warren condense about ten hours of stage material into less than four hours, streamlining Part I and Part II into the first act and pruning Part III for the second act. The production's overall running time is a five-and-a-half hour marathon, with a pair of quarter-hour intermissions and an hour and fifteen minutes in the middle as a "dinner break."
Hall's production - originally mounted at the Watermill Theatre in Newbury, England - transfers to a small upstairs studio space at the lakefront Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Hall uses a young cast of mostly Chicago actors in an all-male ensemble, the twelve actors playing more than thirty roles with a muscular exuberance and a decidedly masculine spin upon the plays' disparagement of "feminine peace." Hall's directorial approach is vital and rebellious, perfectly suited to the material, epic in scope with liberal doses of the blackest of black humor. With its visceral anti-war message and impertinent and angry connective to modern politics, Hall's production becomes a brilliantly revisionist theatrical take on the War of the Roses.
Hall's memorable defining metaphor is a modern industrial slaughterhouse, with a series of steel lockers and mesh cages around a well-worn chopping block. The two-level slaughterhouse, bordered by a metal catwalk above upstage, looks and feels like a house of horrors or torture chamber, replete with hanging steel hooks and accoutrements of butchery, sparsely lit and filled with shifting shadows. The menacing ensemble all wear blood-splattered white butchers' aprons and rubber gloves as well as gas masks as if they fear a toxic waste emergency or a modern chemical attack. They wield butcher knives, hatchets, and cleavers and chop at real slabs of bloody meat in a macabre visual of the carnage and horrors of warfare.
Hall evokes the savagery of the War of the Roses with stunningly graphic imagery. A purple-hooded prisoner is led trembling to the block by a stoic executioner, and when the ax-man rears back a hatchet to behead the prisoner, one of the ensemble butchers smashes a red cabbage into spraying bits of pink vegetable. When a soldier is eviscerated on the battlefield, a plastic-wrapped bag of meat is impaled on one of the sharp hanging hooks and ripped open so some of the entrails hang loose. Cabbages are axed in half for governmental beheadings, meat is chopped and sliced during general warfare, and when a throat is slit in a gangland-style execution, blood drips from a container with resoundingly loud drops into a metal bucket positioned below. The experience is graphic for the audience, literally palpable: the front rows of patrons flinch from spraying blood and spattered flesh, and the small theatre fills with the aroma from butchered animal meat and innards. Hall orchestrates an array of arresting sound effects as a bloody kind of musical accompaniment, from the sound of blades being sharpened against whetstones, the banging of hatchets and cleavers against the block, and the sickening thud from meat being chopped and hacked. The ensemble uses ample amounts of anti-bacterial lotion backstage, reportedly using more than twenty pounds of meat and entrails for a single week of performances. At almost six hours, the slaughterhouse butchery metaphor of course becomes repetitive and somewhat enervating, sardonically illustrating a fine point regarding a similar effect of the thirty-year fifteenth-century conflict upon the civilians, nobles, and soldiers of the time.
When not cleaving animal muscle, intestine, and organs, the ensemble don business suits and military uniforms to portray the politicians and soldiers of the York/Lancaster conflict. Hall and Warren rearrange text as well as prune it, moving the garden scene to an earlier point in order to emphasize the imagery of the white and red roses. Lighting alternates between a smoky white glare of spotlights in the slaughterhouse and pulsating blood-red for the many angry and riotous battlefield depictions. The cast moves with ballet-like fluidity in orderly marches, and between scenes they sing clips from folk songs (like "Abide With Me"), choral anthems (like "Jerusalem") and church hymns and Gregorian chants.
Hall's character focus is of course upon young Henry and the domineering Margaret, with ample stage time also for the Yorks and for the rebellion led by Jack Cade, but with Joan of Arc and the Duchess of Gloucester completely excised. Scott Parkinson's burlesque of Queen Margaret is a campy tour de force in its array of facial expressions (especially eye rolls and disdainful sneers), tones of voice, and body language. Parkinson, wearing a white shawl, a kind of white bandana, and earrings, evokes a ruthless and frightening politician with a clipped French accent, a well-wrought counterpoint to the panicky depiction of a perpetually afraid and inexperienced Henry. She pats his head with droll condescension when he is referred to as a peacekeeper, and earlier, Henry turns away in distressed panic when the nobles kneel before him during the announcement of his ascension to the throne. Henry's death is appropriately graphic: he hangs as if handcuffed from two metal rings as a gleeful Richard tears out his heart, a lump of oozing red offal. The York sons are depicted like 1930s-style Chicago mobsters - hit-men within the Al Capone gang - with Richard an especially sleazy and borderline maniacal assassin. In black fedora and black buttoned-up trench coat, he limps across stage on a twisted clubfoot, wielding a straight-razor with his good hand. His brothers are portrayed as nearly as repellent, Clarence wildly snorting cocaine and Edward an alcoholic lecher, slurring drunkenly in one scene shirtless with an English flag as a makeshift scarf. Richard concludes the production with a sneering snippet from Richard III - "now is the winter of our discontent" - as the lights fade upon the unsettling notion of still more butchery to come in the very near future.
Hall imbues this distinctive production with memorable scenes: citizens stomp rebelliously upon a red-and-white crossed flag of Saint George; a horrified Henry watches from upstage as a father unknowingly slays his own son in battlefield clamor, then as a son unknowingly slays his own father; and the pajamas-wearing twelve-year-old boy Rutland sobs and pleads fruitlessly for his life while the butchers sing a chilling lullaby. The energetic ensemble seems to throw themselves into the story with cheerful abandon, and they thrive on the improvisational aspects Hall permits: during the Jack Cade rebellion, they drift with menacing verve into the audience, intimidating patrons by glaring at them and brandishing club-like wooden weapons, threatening the entire house with violence. The un-intellectual Jack Cade is a plain-speaking common man, and his rallying speeches are delivered in a strutting hip-hop modern rap style.
Rose Rage is a theatrical triumph - scheduled for a New York premiere at The Duke on 2nd Street theatre in September 2004 with the same ensemble cast - a nearly six-hour historical chronicle that makes pointed connections to the contemporary world regarding power politics and the horrors of war but remains an extraordinary entertainment, graphically realized and performed with exuberance.