James' Henry V Receives Nod from Wall Street Journal

James spent the summer directing Henry V for American Players Theatre. This show comes on the heels of last summer's Henry IV, which James co-adapted.
Henry V features Matt Schwader who has performed previously on the Remy Bumppo stage.



Yesterday Henry V received a terrific review from the Wall Street Journal critic Tery Teachout who sad, "APT's version [of Henry V is] staged with dashing directness by James Bohnen, the artistic director of Chicago's Remy Bumppo Theatre. The 39 speaking parts are played by 13 hard-working actors James Ridge delivers [the opening] speech with an incisive authority that sets the tone for the evening. What follows is a show that hurtles pell-mell from scene to scene, led by Matt Schwader, who plays King Henry with youthful fire."

Photo by: Zane Williams

To see the whole article click here.

A Blast from Remy Bumppo's Pinter Past

Oct. 2001 Review of No Man’s Land
Review by Mary Shen Barnidge

They met in a pub earlier that evening. Spooner is a garrulous down-at-heels poet given to soliloquizing after the style of T.S.Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Hirst, to whose home they have repaired, is a laconic square who responds with polite deference to his guest’s vulgar speculations about their respective marital histories. After imbibing an extraordinary amount of undiluted liquor in dainty nibbles, Hirst literally crawls off to bed and Spooner proceeds to steal all the cigarettes from the humidor, only to be interrupted by two rough-trade houseboys who warn him to watch his step. The next morning, Hirst is revealed to be a prestigious Man of Letters whose literary status soon reduces the arrogant Spooner to an obsequious acolyte pleading for favor.

Or so one may interpret the dynamic in Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land. Spooner and HIrst might also be a pair of poufs dancing around the closet door. Or a couple of impotent hets crying over the women who left them. Or maybe their claim to have been school chums is genuine and this encounter a big-chill lament for their lost youth. And what’s with those domestic guard-dogs, Briggs and Foster, and the latter’s boast of hustling—girls, of course—in the fleshpots of the Far East? Pinter, renowned for his enigmatic iconography, offers us no overt signposts, instead inviting us to impose our own contexts on the action.

Neither does Remy Bumppo director James Bohnen nudge us in one direction over another, but allows us, if we wish, to ignore context altogether and just enjoy David Darlow and Joe Van Slyke in roles originally created by (and perhaps for) John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson. Together these seasoned players generate a tag-team sensitivity—how often do actors actually LISTEN to one another?—that transforms the long and almost exclusively two-character first act into a symphony of starts, stops, silences and significant stares.

Giving them a breather from time to time are Nick Sandys and Mark L. Montgomery as the ominous caretakers. Kudos also to Tim Morrison and Allison Boland’s excruciatingly tasteful décor whose very tidiness shimmers with suppressed menace.

Pictured above: NO MANS LAND: Nick Sandys, Joe Van Slyke, Mark Montgomery, David Darlow (2001)

Nick Sandys continues...

Now that we have got through the script a couple of times, have blocked it in one and a half days (unheard of for a Bohnen-meister production!), and tried to work it through, there comes the dreaded memorisation moment, and oh is this going to be fun--Not! Pinter's precision is so poetic, so rhythmic, that any word out of place, or the wrong word, just makes you hiccough in the line anyway. And what with the repetitions and the non-linear leaps, the next few days will feel like an inner circle of hell! Other than that elephant in the room, things are going well, I feel. If only I could actually have a night off to work on the lines and get some sleep, I would be smiling "fit to bust"! We are currently working on bringing the lightness to the menace, finding the places when a character feels in control enough to back off, to ease off the pointed digs and competition because he/she feels like they know something "dead." And of course, they are then undermined within a couple of pages. But this lightness seems really necessary for the play's humor to surface--and will counterpoint with the savage humor when people behave badly. And it is also time for us to dig deeper, to find the sub-basement to use James' words, so that the heavy emotions are accessible and rise up to haunt us. Always uncomfortable but exciting work.

We also are blessed by having a very smart young assistant director in the room, Sean, who not only gives James someone to tell stories to, but who also has a keen eye and has made several great suggestions already. He also gave me an essay on "sats," a Norwegian term for the potential energy that precedes kinetic action, a vital part of the threat bubbling under the surface of any Pinter play. The essay connects the writings of many theatre theorists and practitioners, who all agree on the necessity of this power to generate meaning for the audience and transmit intentions even when nothing is actually acted out--like watching a cat focus before it chases: you know what it is going to do, what it wants to chase and destroy. Now that is Pinter--none of that "weasel under the sideboard" rubbish!