Talking with York

[The following is a transcript of an interview by the editor (TP) with Steven Skybell (SS), a young actor who appeared as the Duke of York in the 1996 New York Public Theater production of Henry VI, directed by Karin Coonrod. The production rearranged the three plays into two performances: the first, “The Edged Sword,” began with the funeral of Henry V (1 Henry VI, 1.1), closed its first act with the death of Joan of Arc (1 Henry VI, 5.4), and ended with the death of Suffolk (2 Henry VI, 4.1); the second evening, “Black Storm,” opened with the Jack Cade rebellion (2 Henry VI, 4.2), closed the first act with Henry and the father and son murderers at Towton (2.5), and continued to the apparent triumph of York that ends Part 3. Mr. SkybelPs references to the first part, or evening, or to the first act relate to the divisions of this production. The transcript has been edited and somewhat regularized; as promised to Mr. Skybell, we both sound a little smarter and smoother than in fact we were.] TP

Steven, tell me something about how the production began. From what I’ve read, Karin Coonrod seems to have been very good to work with.

SS

She really was. The whole process was very unusual in terms of the theater because we did a workshop of the first evening [“The Edged Sword”]—it must have been about a four-week workshop, which again is unusual, and we concentrated on her staging; just doing the first evening, not even with the knowledge that it was going to be us in the final production. It was just a workshop as actors often do. Then it was a year later that the same group, luckily, was reassembled to do a workshop of the second evening [“Black Storm”].

TP

It was 1996 when the production opened at the Public?

SS

Probably late fall 1996. So this would have been two years preceding when we did the first workshop; then a year later we did the second, and then about four months later, we started full eight-week rehearsal period. So the amazing thing was the luxury of having that much time to be thinking about the characters and familiarizing yourself with the material.

TP

Did you know the play as a text or from another production?

SS

No, never read it, never seen it. In fact it was my first history play. I’d done a fair amount of Shakespeare before that, but I’d never done a history play.

TP

I see that you did Two Gentlemen as well. You’re becoming an expert in obscure Shakespeare.

SS

And Troilus and Cressida in the Park too; definitely some obscure ones. But it was a revelation to do a history play because there’s a general perception that they’re kind of dry, harder to get dramatically exciting, and I found actually the opposite to be true in terms of performing it.

TP

I was very much struck in reading some background on this by the sense that this was done by a company; there were very few of you—ten people.

SS

Right, ten people.

TP

Which means everybody is doubling like mad. But in going through the cast list, it seems that everybody got a chance to do a really fat role, everybody got a chance to hold the stage.

SS

Definitely, that was true. And in productions of Shakespeare I’ve been in where there was doubling, it makes everyone’s evening a complete thing, and that’s so rewarding for an actor. You realize that in Shakespeare’s day, things were being written for the strengths of certain performers. There was a core of people that would take on the heft of the evening and that would be fulfilling to them.

TP

I think curiously these plays, where you don’t have one big star role—no Henry V, no Richard III—you do have loads and loads of strong roles. Now, York was your big role; you got both of the soliloquies, right?

SS

Yeah, I did. You know, York’s a great role, a great role.

TP

From what I could judge there was some cutting, but you didn’t lose much as York.

SS

I don’t think so. Talbot was cut back, and the Jack Cade rebellion as well, but we concentrated the main story—it’s Henry and it’s York. I’m not aware of much cutting within York’s role.

TP

This I think you would have been aware of—if there was cutting within York’s big speeches, your death speech with Margaret and your two big soliloquies.

SS

No, those were basically played as written.

TP

The cutting seems to have been of actions; Horner and Peter, for example, went away.

SS

Yes, they did. That’s how we did it.

TP

Something also happened with you as Bedford: you got killed early on as Bedford.

SS

Well, there was also some taking one character and consolidating him with another, just to keep the storytelling as clean as possible.

TP

Did you get shot up on the balcony as Bedford?

SS

No, I got shot down on the main playing area, but I did get shot.

TP

And by the gunner’s boy?

SS

Yeah, that’s right.

TP

So you had to get killed as Bedford so that you could come back as York?

SS

That’s right. I remember that Karin thought it was important to have that first death. It’s the first death in the whole story, so we wanted that moment. But they just needed it to be that character—I forget why, but they wanted to have a through line for certain other characters.

TP

I think it can’t be Salisbury [who is actually the character shot by the gunner’s boy] because Salisbury comes back on later as one of your supporters.

SS

Right, right.

TP

Historically, they were two different Salisburys and Shakespeare keeps them apart, but it’s different when you guys are putting it all together. But I wanted to get back to another aspect of this company thing. It seems that as York you had very strong interaction, a big scene that’s actually a two scene, with, I’d guess, about five different people. With Joan, with Margaret. When we talked about this before, you spoke of York as down on women and the one I’d forgotten—you also arrest Eleanor, don’t you?

SS

Right, yes, I do. That was Karin. It’s interesting that the Public hired a woman to direct this play that has such strong women, and she was the one who highlighted that aspect of the character for me. York has these high confrontational scenes with women, and that’s interesting, that might mean something, and yet since his wife is nowhere to be seen, you see him as the one caretaker for his sons. You get to see a love he has for his family as well as any strange feeling he might have about women.

TP

I remember reading in Coursen’s book [Shakespeare: The Two Traditions ]—and he’s very impressed with your production—

SS

Good, good. I’m glad.

TP

I don’t remember the actor’s name, but Coursen found Somerset—

SS

That was a woman, Jan Leslie Harding, who also played Joan.

TP

So that was her big role.

SS

Yeah, it comes very early in the play.

TP

To get back to Coursen. He praised her playing of Somerset in a manner that explains why he (or she) continually drives you up the wall.

SS

Yes, for whatever reason, there’s such antagonism between them that stays in the play through such a high arc until finally York has his head. There is this desire—

TP

Did you get to carry his head?

SS

Yeah, there’s a bloody scene in which Richard brings it in, and we tossed it. He tossed it to me. Richard has deserved best of all my sons—

TP

I was interested because you end up killing Old Clifford at that first battle, but the fellow who all the way from the Temple Garden scene is your opposite number is Somerset. And he gets killed by your son, who seems to be plugging into Dad’s animosity. Throwing the head.

SS

That’s right. There definitely was a true antagonism, and—this is Karin—she hoped to have the same overtones from Joan of Arc. You know it was the same actor having that highly antagonistic relationship, so that it would have its own cumulative effect.

TP

And just as the door closed on Joan, Margaret appeared, so that the sense of woman as disruptive—

SS

And French women, the She-wolf of France—

TP

This is Coursen again, talking about these plays, and I think he says something that you seem to have been very much onto. “What Shakespeare was doing in these plays was beginning to find out what he intended to mean. What he intended to mean was to excite his audience into discovering they meant. The process still works” [Two Traditions 67]. That it’s exploratory. There are things developing, going on, in what would be your Part 2, Act 2 that wouldn’t make sense if you didn’t have the three earlier pieces.

SS

That’s right.

TP

There seems to be an enormous amount of matching or paralleling of scenes you were into with the women, but that seems to have been strong throughout Karin’s staging For an obvious example, you stand on the same molehill as Henry.

SS

The staging was very inventive and not without its challenges, because some things were rearranged at the last minute. I remember the thing about the space that was wonderful was that it was so intimate; the audience was split on either side, and you didn’t feel you had to reach too far in any direction. There was a scene in which all these chairs came down for the Parliament scene—

TP

When you all turn on Humphrey—

SS

That’s right, and I respected Karin as a director because she had a sense of minimal staging; she wanted to let the language really be the action, and this one Parliament scene was all about looks. She wanted it to be very tense, but very still. I always think that’s such a good thing, especially for Shakespeare. You know there are fight scenes, big physical movements, but so often if you just let the language be the action and be very simple about where things are placed—

Figure 4 Jan Leslie Harding (Joan of Arc) and Steven Skybell (York) in the New York Public Theater production of “The Edged Sword,” part one of a two-part adaptation of Henry VI. By courtesy of the New York Public Theater; photo by Michael Daniel. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203775547/7e40078d-1804-409f-8bfe-fb355357c8d5/content/fig4_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> TP

You did the same staging with Warwick?

SS

That right, and she felt that one of the moving things about the plays’ history is that things just happen again and again and on the same boards, and history in this way repeats itself.

TP

Yes, when we talked about this before—and no actor could miss this—one of your York soliloquies is Shakespeare clearly getting ready to create Richard III.

SS

Again, that’s something I really responded to in the character, that although he’s the father of Richard III, and definitely has all the makings of a Richard III, there is something about him that has not quite fallen over to that side. People always say that the strength of Shakespeare is that if you read the character, you see it from that character’s point of view. I really feel that about York, because although he’s called the rabble-rouser and the usurper, when I played him, it was so obvious that he was doing it from such a place of righteousness in himself.

TP

When he announces that he’d be a better king than Henry, he’s really got a case.

SS

And that again is what I love about it, as opposed to a play, say the Scottish Play. I feel that the audience’s sympathies and their sense of balance are always being questioned in the Henry VI’s. The characters all make good points, and you see them go from such places of innocence—just a fight in a garden that then becomes more and more menacing.

TP

You know, you could make the same point with the opposite argument, that there’s nobody in the play—except for Henry, and even he does some things along the way—

SS

Yes, they’re all cutthroats; they’re all power-hungry.

TP

This is something I wanted to ask about, and not everyone reads it this way, but when you and Somerset fail Talbot, it seems to me that Shakespeare made Somerset more culpable than he made York.

SS

That was always a very hard scene, but he did, in my impression as well. It seemed as if Somerset was laying a trap, a trap for both Talbot and myself, and yet Lucy, who’s there, says that both are guilty, that, you know, you could give in, you could do it too. It’s sort of a Catch-22. That was a hard scene because at that point Talbot is the golden child, England’s savior, and we’re the ones who do him in.

TP

And if York fails at about the same level as Somerset, I’d guess you thought that was going to make trouble for things you’d do later on.

SS

Yes, but if you look at the sweep of all three plays, you really do encompass that wide arc of doing bad things and doing good things, noble things and ignoble, and hopefully you find a balance.

TP

Once Shakespeare gets through with Henry VI and gets to Richard III, he pretty much blows that off, and everybody is black and white, especially with Richmond at the end.

SS

I guess so. You know, I’m not sure what it would be like to go to the theater and just see Part 3. You feel as if his scope and desire to tell a story were more rambling and more long arching, and then he became a little more formulaic.

TP

That’s one of the reasons I’m interested in these plays. How do you do these things in a commercial theater? They have no closure at all. When Part 2 ends, you’ve just won the battle of St. Albans and Warwick has the last line—let’s get to London before they do—and that’s what happens to open Part 3—

SS

Yes, and it’s very early in Part 3 that I die, and I was so thankful we were doing it in a different dramatic structure, because to have your third evening begin with such a high, such an end point, I think that that would be very frustrating for the actor and a challenge to have to start the evening and hit that point so early in the evening. A really tough challenge; one that I’m glad I didn’t have to take on.

TP

I think it would be tough for the audience too, to respond to the death of York.

SS

Yeah, I wonder, and this ties in a little with having played the Globe. At the Globe, the crowd really dictates how they want to perceive anything. It’s so clear that the burning of Joan and the taunting of Joan would have been a great scene for cheering; they would have been so into the defeat of France.

TP

She did “Done like a Frenchman, turn and turn again” in your production?

SS

Yes.

TP

And got a rise from the audience. You can imagine what that rise would have been in the Globe.

SS

Absolutely.

TP

How did you burn Joan, by the way?

SS

Oh, it was amazing. Because Joan was in a simple, blue pinafore dress, and this was the end of the first act of the first evening, and they brought in at the end a raised case—her dress was encased and it was rigged to go up in flames—it was a paper dress, so it was sort of burning the emblem of the little girl. It was quite stirring.

TP

You also had some props coming down from above, didn’t you?

SS

Yes, the coffin of Henry V came down at the very beginning, with a big thud.

TP

And Cardinal Beaufort sits on it.

SS

Right.

TP

That’s something you apparently went for. You realized that at times when the conflict devolves into an absurdity that can get a laugh.

SS

I think Karin felt she had to have that too, in order to entertain but also to create tension and release, and it is true that there are lots of asides—there are times when you’re in cahoots with the audience. There can be a kind of knowingness that gets a laugh.

TP

You had a very strange stage; raked downward as you go upstage.

SS

Yeah, it was odd. Well, on one side there was a raised high platform that sloped down, and that was where I died and fell down.

TP

You were standing on the platform?

SS

No, I was just standing on this area down, and then when she stabbed me, I went back against the wall and was able to just kind of slide down because this corner was raked all the way down. It was covered actually in real leather, sort of animal skins.

TP

Did you have a balcony area? I’m thinking especially for the sieges of the cities.

SS

There was. It was basically a playing area that was confined like a balcony. Toward the end, when Margaret was on one side and the two sons of York and Warwick were on the other, that was definitely a pitting of the two different camps on two different levels. But there’s another scene when York and his sons are on one side and Henry and Margaret and Somerset on the other, and that was all played in the same area. And we did—this was an interesting staging of Karin’s which illuminated what was going on in the text. No one entered the area until he spoke; so I entered, and then Henry entered, and so on. It was the gathering of forces, but all in the same playing space, facing off.

TP

I also wanted to ask about speaking the verse. This is very early and the verse seems very stiff, relatively little variation, not many run-over lines—

SS

Right.

TP

I think all your big speeches are this way.

SS

Pretty much all three plays are this way. It’s very ordered, very regular meter, every thought is five feet long. It’s very line by line. But it wasn’t a problem for me. I mean, you recognize it, you see it, and it’s simpler than other verse that you have to wrap your tongue and wrap your mind around to convey the meaning. And in that sense it’s very easy to convey the meaning. There’s some Shakespeare, later Shakespeare, where you fear that the audience really will not follow, and this is cruder in a way, but much more immediately accessible to the audience. I always relish it in Shakespeare when you can simply say the line and know it’s understood for what it is. And York gets to say a lot of things that have that immediate impact that I was happy to have. When York is being sent to Ireland and says that that’s exactly what he wants, that they’re putting weapons in a madman’s hand, I always heard the audience go “Oh.” They understood exactly.

TP

How directly did you play that to the audience?

SS

Oh, pretty directly. It was such a challenge to talk to that audience; they were so present, on both sides [at the Public].

TP

And on three sides at the Globe?

SS

Sometimes even four; they sell seats in the gallery. I believe that in Shakespeare’s day it was more important that they could hear rather than see. So as long as they could hear Juliet, they didn’t necessarily have to see her on the balcony, because with the columns and with sitting up there [in the gallery], it wouldn’t have been a beautiful stage picture, not from our perspective in the twentieth century, it would have been kind of cluttered, and what’s going on?

TP

What’s it like to play in the open air in the afternoon, where everyone can see you?

SS

It’s amazing; it’s amazing. I’ve never performed in a space quite like it, and after, I thought how am I going to go back to performing at night, in the dark, in covered rooms. It was a real revelation. I’ve done Shakespeare in the Park at the Delacorte, which is the antithesis to that, because you’re here with a microphone, and the audience is way over there, and if it rains everybody goes home. Whereas at the Globe, you can see everybody, and even though it’s a good-sized theater, it’s intimate, and of course if it rains, you keep going because only the groundlings get wet. Anyone seated doesn’t get wet, and the actors don’t get wet. We had that with Henry V; at times there was rain, and when he talked about rain at the battle of Harfleur and it was coming down—it was really coming down—and that was a revelation for me as an actor, to think about all those references to weather. I played the French Constable and I had a line about their climate being so rotten and raw. It was great, especially at the Globe, because they just hated me; they just loved to hate the French.

TP

But aren’t you the one person among the French for whom we’re going to have any respect, because you’re so down on the Dauphin?

SS

Yes, but there was a sense that I was the captain of the opposing team. You could respect the power I represent, but they loved to boo. It was quite a thing. But the references to weather, as I said, if it was a sunny day, that would get them going, or if it was a rainy day, that would get them going. And you realize that that was a big thing for outdoor theaters. I think of Hamlet pointing to the clouds; we might have no clouds to point to if we were outdoors.

TP

I’d like to know something about working with the posts. You’d think it’s a God-awful idea because of what it does to the sight lines, but—Coursen again—you do have to remember that the audience was standing, and even those who were sitting weren’t in seats but on benches, and they could move.

SS

As they do at the Globe. Mark Rylance, the artistic director of the Globe, always loved to refer to the alternate title of Twelfth Night, What You Will, because he really feels it’s always what you the audience want, and so from the audience point of view, if you’re not interested in what’s going on here, then walk around, change your perspective, see it from a different point of view, and that’s remarkable about the groundlings.

TP

In this context, when you get them to really stand still, that’s when you’ve got them.

SS

That’s right, that’s right. And we did. With the Crispin’s Day speech, after all the moving and cheering and booing, then that moment was so quiet—a hushed quietness so that the actor doesn’t even have to project to be heard. It was really something.

TP

You would have been at the Globe about two years ago?

SS

Two years, right. I was asked back, but just because it’s so long, it’s six months over there—I’d like to go back; but it was a little too soon to go back for another half year, and also it was such a great experience that I would be afraid that it wouldn’t match up, you know?

TP

To go back to the Public production, your back wall was very important to the production.

SS

There were two walls, so I don’t know which one you mean. There was a sloping wall—

TP

Weren’t there graffiti visible at some point?

SS

Yes, I guess there was. There was a sort of Tyvek material that went away for the latter part of the second evening and revealed the wall of the theater, on which was an upside down crown and words, and lines from the play just scrawled there.

TP

Was that where you did your genealogy chart?

SS

No, that would have been on another side. There was a little blackboard where I wrote it.

TP

Oh, you actually wrote it?

SS

Oh, I wrote it, I wrote it all. I had to know it all, you know, the seven sons. I gave them sort of initials, but I wrote it all down. I showed how if you followed the third son, you get to me, and how if you followed the fourth son, you get to Henry. It’s so clear. (Laughs) I mean, it is clear. Warwick says what could be plainer than this. It is plain, but it’s also not plain at all. Another thing about the women—if you remember how Henry V starts, about the Salic law and whether you can inherit through the woman. And in this play, I have a claim through a woman, which is interesting since York has this issue with women. But without women, he wouldn’t even have a claim to the throne. I know we spoke about this before. After York died, Karin Coonrod had me come back as Lady Bona, and that was a sort of coup de grace for York: he has to come back as a woman.

TP

This business of recognizing actors coming back in other roles was part of this production, wasn’t it?

SS

That’s right, there was no attempt to disguise that; we sort of celebrated that.

TP

Didn’t you play Bona behind a scarf?

SS

No, I had a long veil, and I might have just played with it, but I didn’t cover my face. I had a beard, as I do now, so we just played it like that. And also by that point in the evening, there was an attempt to make Lady Bona humorous. What would she be otherwise? She’d just be sincere. That was a directorial choice; let’s make this fun as opposed to—

TP

I expect you get a laugh when the King and Lady Bona are sympathetic to Margaret until Warwick shows up with a better offer.

SS

Right, right.

TP

You have one good line as Lady Bona—“I’ll wear the willow garland for his sake”—and having a guy with a beard say this—

SS

Yeah, it was fun.

TP

Steven, with Old Clifford at the first battle of St. Albans, you and Clifford have speeches in which each admires the other as a chivalric presence; to the effect that if you weren’t my enemy—I wonder if this stuff survived?

SS

Yes, that was in the text. We may have trimmed it a little, but definitely I remember those lines. If you weren’t my enemy—It’s a deep line, and he also says something after he kills Clifford, wishing him peace, as opposed to the killing of Somerset, which was a vindictive, a tainting victory.

TP

Or when Margaret kills you.

SS

Yeah, but the Clifford killing is different; it’s more complicated.

TP

Yes, and I think as you found out playing it, that it’s good to have it here, before everything goes on a downward slope, as a point of reference when you’re throwing Somerset’s head around. Something else. You also played Stafford; you and your brother confront Cade, and you both get killed.

SS

That’s right. I’m trying to remember because we went through so many variations. Stafford was still in, but it wasn’t as we originally staged it. We were just voices from way up above calling down, and then we do get killed, but you don’t get to see that.

TP

There’s actually a lot of narrative in the Cade rebellion.

SS

Yes, the Cade rebellion was difficult for us to get and get right. It’s tricky because the crowd comes in with such a presence. We wrestled with it, and Karin wrestled with how much to put in. The rebellion is important for Henry because that’s where things really start to crumble for him.

TP

The play links Cade to York, but when he comes out on stage, he doesn’t seem to be York’s creature; he seems quite autonomous.

SS

Well, that’s something Karin picked up on, that if York started a fire with Cade, it gets completely out of control. She even characterized Cade as a sort of the Green Man, a pagan element from the country that gets riled with the power and the fever of what he’s doing against the power structure.

TP

And his pitch has an attraction to it: we common people are always suffering.

SS

Absolutely. In some ways the Cade rebellion is the most contemporary; it’s almost like Brecht, the revolution of the common man, and it’s fascinating because Jack Cade is so right in his cause and yet so wrong.

TP

I think that a production that used period costume would make it easier to establish what Cade is. But you apparently did this in stylized costume with a kind of color coding, with everyone in gold on the first evening—

SS

And in grey on the second night. But everyone wore the same thing—jodhpurs, boots, a T-shirt, and different sorts of overcoats, but that still wouldn’t delineate class. With different costuming, it would have been easier to understand the Cade business in specific terms of that time, without laying on anything from the twentieth century, without any suggestions of the other revolutions that have occurred since that time. And you can’t help but think of them when you see something that seems so recognizable in recent history.

TP

Alexander Iden killed Cade in your production, right?

SS

Yes, that’s right.

TP

That gets talked about by critics nowadays in some odd ways, because Iden is a bourgeois, a property owner, not an aristocrat, and some critics want to see Iden as a representative of capitalism, as a bad guy.

SS

But I don’t think he is. And that’s how Walker Jones played him. He’s just a burgher, a satisfied middle-class man who has done well by life, and then Public Enemy Number One comes into his backyard.

TP

Iden may be something of a problem for being so obviously a symbol of contentedness.

SS

Yes, there’s something of a rough quality to these plays in terms of how things come in and out like that. Like the Margaret-Suffolk farewell, that’s remarkable, that seems so developed—two people who are having such a fine tuned dialogue. And then you have Alexander Iden coming on and announcing I am Alexander Iden; it’s a sort of roughshod dramaturgy.

TP

Margaret and Suffolk scene is surprising. Suddenly you’re let into such heightened and romantic feelings that you had no idea these people possessed.

SS

It’s amazing. But the role of Margaret, if you follow her journey all the way through Richard III—what other character has been so totally realized and by such a playwright? And to go from her innocence at the beginning through the arc of her role. As an actor, when you come to Henry VI, which is three plays, you have so much put before you, and when you do the historical research and find out what really happened and what Shakespeare did with it, and then you have the luxury of seeing what happens to your character and who the people are he affects. You know, I also played Bedford, who was Henry V’s brother, and so that whole play became a background resource.

TP

Let me go back to York’s thing with women. You arrested Eleanor Cobham, right?

SS

Yes.

TP

And alone, without Buckingham?

SS

Right, he was cut. And Karin of course wanted to heighten that animosity.

TP

Yes, that comes across. When I was going through your big scenes, you had one with Joan, one with Margaret, I had forgotten Eleanor, and then of course Somerset was played by a woman. Let me ask you about the Temple Garden scene. You had something like a grass carpet—

SS

That was something that rolled down this sloping wall, and in it were all the red and white flowers. So we went and picked our flowers.

TP

When you played that scene—I know you don’t get to say specifically—but in terms of your own preparation, did you know what the argument was about ?

SS

We decided ultimately to make it something nonspecific in law. It was nothing dead on about attached versus arrested or anything like that. We all came on wearing glasses and carrying briefcases, as if we were in the last year of law school, and from an innocent but heated discussion about something unrelated, these old wounds opened, but it was something unrelated that we were asking people to say who’s right.

TP

Some people who write about the play claim that what they’re arguing about is of course York’s claim to the throne.

SS

No, if you think of the scene where I lay it all out; we imagined that in a dark room, in emptiness. This isn’t something you go around spouting. There would be no need to have that scene if this were being discussed among people.