Arts & Entertainment

Hudson Shakespeare Company Brings Henry V to Monument Park

"Shakespeare in the Park" returns Tuesday for the first of two performances of one of the "Bard of Avon's" better-known works

Fort Lee’s 2011 season of Shakespeare in the Park continues Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. in on Palisade Ave. with the first of two performances of Henry V.

Sponsored by the Fort Lee Office of Cultural and Heritage Affairs, the series brings the Hudson Shakespeare Company—now in its 20th season touring communities in northern New Jersey and Connecticut—to Fort Lee for the second time this summer after two performances of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the park in June.

If you miss Tuesday’s performance in Fort Lee, or if weather turns out to be an issue, you will have another chance. An encore performance is scheduled for next Tuesday, Aug. 2, as well—same time, same place. Shows are free to the public, and patrons are encouraged to bring lawn chairs, blankets and coolers.

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Later in August, the company will also be treating Fort Lee Shakespeare buffs to two productions of the seldom-performed Tymon of Athens.

Below is a synopsis of Henry V provided to Patch by the Hudson Shakespeare Company:

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“Henry V” has been reinterpreted and deconstructed in each generation to suit the feel of its time. From the patriotic fervor of the Laurence Olivier version during World War II, to the anti-war sentiments of Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 film, the play no doubt is a thoughtful meditation on both of these extremes. The genius of Shakespeare is that he blends the two different elements into a moving and thought-provoking story that both receive equal weight and validity. Hudson Shakespeare takes the approach on concentrating on the man at the center of it all - Henry V ([played by] Jimmy Pravasilis) and the personal struggle of living up to satisfy the needs of his country, his father’s legacy, his peers, his soldiers and, most of all, to himself.

Otherwise known as Hal, Prince Harry, or Harry Le Roy, Henry is known by many nicknames, which reflects the many hats he wears in his life. In his early life, he ran away from the constant civil wars faced by his father and extended family to live as a simple commoner. He found an ideal of life amongst the constantly inebriated thieves of the Boar’s Head tavern, Nym (Josh Fielden), Bardolph (Jessica Cermak) and Pistol (David Neal), and the surrogate father figure of Sir John Falstaff. Here Harry could engage in petty larceny but also let his hair down and be himself. He also found himself being used because of those same people whom he called friends. Upon his father’s death, he renounced his thieving friends to assume the title of King of a deeply divided and bankrupt kingdom.

The play opens shortly after the death of the former king, who himself had taken the crown in a rebellion against the real king and Henry is faced with the question of waging war on France to claim lands that belong to his family. In a tense opening gambit, the inexperienced king fends off influential clergy, nobles who want him dead, family who think he’s not up to task and the French who think he is an ineffectual boy. Always needing to prove himself to a disapproving world, Henry launches into the war to show his quality. Suffering personal loss, a loosing war, Henry the man wrestles with what it means to be a king, to be a common man without the weight of the crown and what it means to truly be himself.

Battle weary and lost, he finds solace and perspective in the soldiers that surround him in the grunt officers of Fluellen (Imran Sheik) and Gower (Leanne Mercandante), the brash Williams (Noelle Fair), and even in his own uncle Exeter (Henri Douvry). Henry realizes that in order to be king, it needs to be on his own terms, not as a talking political figurehead, not someone lost in the pomp and circumstance of the crown, not as a corrupt politician, but as the plain spoken and working day man he has always been.


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