Theatre for a New Audience

The eminent Shakespearean actor and scholar Dakin Matthews adapts the two parts of Henry IV into one long three-act history play. Matthews also plays the title role, and Elijah Jones is his restless heir, Hal, who falls in with a feckless crowd. The plum role of Hal's principal bad influence, the expansive and mendacious Sir John Falstaff, falls to the reliably marvelous Jay O. Sanders (Uncle Vanya). The cast of 16 also includes James Udom as Henry "Hotspur" Percy—Hal's heated rival for his father's affections—and Cara Ricketts as his wife. Bedlam's Eric Tucker directs for TFANA. 

Awoye Timpo, who directed Theatre for a New Audience's beautiful 2019 revival of Alice Childress's Wedding Band, returns to TFANA with another overlooked work of Black drama: The first major play by Nigeria's Wole Soyinka, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. This 1958 one-act tells the story of a young man from the flooded Niger delta who is mistreated by his rapacious twin brother and disappointed by the overfed Yoruba priest of the Serpent of the Swamp.