War of the Roses

"The War of the Roses" at Cal Shakes is not just one play. Director Eric Ting and adapter Philippa Kelly have merged four related Shakespeare plays - "Henry VI Parts 1-3" and "Richard III" - into a single, titanic omnibus.

Consequently, "The War of the Roses" is four-hours long, demanding an almost soldierly constitution from audiences. Some actual wars have shorter engagement times.

This is the story of England's disastrous string of medieval civil wars. When idealistic but weak-kneed King Henry VI (Joseph Patrick O'Malley, looking like the bullied teen nerd hero of an '80s comedy) takes the throne, no one respects him enough to keep their own ambitions from boiling over into conflict.

Even Henry's captive French wife Queen Margaret (Aysan Celik, more on her in a bit) ends up defying him to raise an army and go to war against rival English lords.

By the time all is said and done the crown has changed hands nearly half a dozen times. To give you an idea of what the king game was like, consider that the Cal Shakes' prop department created severed heads modeled on two of the leads here.

At the outset, "Roses" has the makings of a disaster. Most of these plays are really not particularly good to begin with, of necessity they're edited down to the bone.

There are so many characters that the production resorts to supertitles to tell us who everyone is and why they're important. And the slam-bang pace of the action means that by the time we've finally grown comfortable with a particular role that character will soon be dead anyway.

It doesn't take long for the standard royal tropes - assassination, execution, and revolution - to begin to feel excessive. But the peaceful solutions aren't much preferred, since the political maneuverings at the English court sound like gibberish much of the time.

Yep, Ting's show stumbles into pretty much every obstacle it set up for itself. But, improbably, "The War of the Roses" still turns out to be a remarkable play.

Some of the appeal lies just in its ambition. The whirlwind entrances, exits, scene changes, costumes changes, fight scenes, and death scenes one after another generate epic scale almost by inertia alone.

Actor and guitarist Josh Pollock (recently from the soaring rock opera "Weightless" at Z Space) creates a hellish, Vietnam War-like musical score that keeps the tone fairly even despite the constant action.

And at some point even the volume of material, heavy lift though it is, starts to serve the audience well, as you can't help but ponder the ramifications of the bloodshed across all four stories.

The cast is basically performing miracles here. Stacy Ross, for example, goes from playing the noble but weary Earl of Gloucester (with a Nixon-like shoulder slump) to hot-blooded rock star King Edward IV to the haunted and venomous Duchess of York, all in about two hours.

That's exhausting just to write, much less actually do. But of course she's good at it all, because Ross is good at essentially every part she's ever touched.

The two actors allowed to stick with the same roles for nearly the whole thing come out the luckiest in the end. Celik plays Queen Margaret in all her many forms: prisoner, politician, general, mother, widow, and even executioner.

Admittedly it's hard to reconcile all of these together. But the spectacle of an actor taking on essentially an entire life in a few hours is breathtaking nevertheless.

The other big winner is Danny Scheie, the de facto main character as scheming sadist King Richard III.

Scheie usually gets comedic roles, but there's always a maniac quality to his comedy that curdles into villainy quite naturally. Richard is arguably the part Scheie was born for, and boy does he know it.

In another clever production signature, he delivers his murderous monologues into a handheld mic he carries around in his pocket, literally broadcasting his evil intentions.

"War of the Roses" is not going to be the best play you see all year. But it's a singular opportunity for audiences and actors, one that creates a space unlike any we're likely to experience again. And in that sense it might be called truly historic.

"The War of the Roses" runs through September 14 at the Bruns Memorial Amphitheater in Orinda. For tickets and information, call 510-548-9666 or visit CalShakes.org.