HENRY VI: A Trilogy in Two Parts ★★★★

The Public Theater and NAATCO (National Asian American Theatre Company) have heavily promoted the Henry VI plays as one of George R.R. Martin’s chief inspirations for Game of Thrones. Martin has said as much in interviews, and it’s a savvy hook for audiences who couldn’t tell a York from a Lancaster. But if you’re going to invoke one of television’s most addictive sagas of dynastic warfare, fractured alliances, and spectacular betrayals, you’d better deliver. Happily, Henry VI: A Trilogy in Two Parts largely does — especially in its exhilarating second part.

But you have to get through Part I of this Shakespeare marathon first, and not only is it longer, it’s duller. Director and adaptor Stephen Brown-Fried has done an admirable job compressing the three Henry VI plays into two parts (and in under six hours), but this trilogy of history plays is rarely staged for good reason: it’s not the Bard’s finest work. Nonetheless, they merit attention: they’re Shakespeare’s earliest surviving works (possibly written in collaboration with Christopher Marlowe), and they make excellent prequels for anyone who only knows Richard III.

Endless talky exposition dressed up in cluttered court intrigue dominates Part I — the focus goes back and forth between England and France as the French Dauphin takes advantage of the death of Henry V and begins reclaiming English-held territory, with the fabled assistance of a fiery Joan la Pucelle, better known as Joan of Arc — and almost everyone comes and goes very quickly, leaving the audience too little time to connect to anyone except the sweetly naive Henry VI (Jon Norman Schneider, touchingly innocent), a babe of nine months when he inherited the throne.

Once Brown-Fried gets past the heft of the laborious back-and-forth among the powerbrokers and into Part II, the focus shifts to individual characters who hang around long enough to make an impact, most notably Margaret (Teresa Avia Lim), whose betrothal to Henry VI stirs up a hornet’s nest that puts the action in a much higher gear.

Margaret’s character arc is the most interesting one in the trilogy, and it’s easy to see echoes of her in Martin’s Cersei Lannister. The minute Margaret enters the picture, the entire production lifts, and Lim lights up the stage. Surprisingly, Lim succeeds more with Margaret’s initial lightness than her descent into cruelty and unbridled fury; this Margaret’s greatest strength is her charm, along with her killer wardrobe, designed by fashion collective threeASFOUR (Gabriel Asfour, Adi Gil, Angela Donhauser), who bring high battle chic to the war front. Dressed in these ensembles, the entire cast is serving; in one grand entrance, Team Dauphin resemble Star Wars stormtroopers as fantasized by Jean Paul Gaultier.

With clothes like that at stake, bloodletting is inevitable, and the fight choreography by Orlando Pabotoy and Kimiye Corwin keeps finding inventive new ways to spill (unseen) blood, powered by Brown-Fried’s confident, propulsive direction and NAATCO’s superb 16-person all-Asian American ensemble, all of whom play multiple roles and die multiple times. As the saga reaches its dramatic end, two leave lasting impressions along with Schneider and Lim: David Shih (as Edward) and Julyana Soelistyo (as his younger brother Richard), the fraternal power players standing. Both will be future kings, but only the latter will get Shakespeare’s full villain treatment.

Epic in scope and length, this worthwhile endeavor may lack dragons, but if what hooked you on Game of Thrones was the ruthless jockeying for power, shifting loyalties, and mounting body count, Henry VI: A Trilogy in Two Parts proves Shakespeare was playing the game centuries before George R.R. Martin.