Alex Harvey

September 8-21, 2009

3B Development Series

Intimate and lawless in its scope, check 2girl henry5 follows crown princess Katherine of Valois and her lady in waiting Alice as they wile away the hours holed up in Katherine’s bed chamber. Somewhere far outside the palace walls a domineering English king, claiming inheritance to the French throne, advances through countryside. In the less than two hours traffic of our stage Katherine and Alice imagine the war that he is waging against their homeland as they act out the more than 25 characters of Shakespeare’s Henry V.

What starts as an English lesson transforms into a dangerous role-playing game as the girls dig deep into imagined causes and consequences of the Franco-Anglo conflict. Their own twisted relationship as servant and mistress eventually breaks the surface of their role-play and the melee of Agincourt takes on a new meaning as the girls tear the crown princess’ room to shreds. Is the content of our stage fantasies being played out somewhere in real life just outside the walls of our minds? If Katherine follows the Shakespearean chorus’ advice too closely could she unwittingly imagine her worst nightmare into existence?

With Melinda Helfrich and Kate Eastwood Norris

Resident Artist

Alex Harvey is a freelance Director/Adapter based out of Brooklyn. Recent directing credits include Underneath the Lintel at the Alley Theatre as well as Houston premieres of Mr. Marmalade for Stages Repertory and I Am My Own Wife for Stages Repertory Theatre in co-production with Stage West Des Moines. A longtime student of classical text, he helmed a five-person staging of Macbeth for the Mirror Repertory Company in New York in 2006 and his own radical adaptation of The Mock-Tempest for Shakespeare Santa Cruz in 2007. Alex was the 2008 recipient of the Drama League’s New Directors/New Works fellowship for which he adapted and his own version of Ernst Toller’s Hinkemann, entitled Brokenbrow. This adaptation has received subsequent developmental workshops at Lincoln Center and New York Theatre Workshop.

In 2009 his adaptation of Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire was developed at the Arts Research Center in Berkeley and at the Orchard Project in Hunter, NY. While based in Chicago Alex directed the Jeff Award Recommended world premiere of Keith Huff’s The Bird and Mr. Banks for Live Bait Theatre, Swifty DuPont for Collaboraction, and an adaptation of The Knight of the Burning Pestle for the Wing and Groove Theatre. In 2004 he staged the world premiere of General Desdemona at the Edinburgh Fringe Theatre Festival. He spent 2005 in New Haven as a Directing Resident at the Long Wharf Theatre, and has worked in new play development at Steppenwolf Theatre and New York Theatre Workshop. He graduated with honors from Northwestern University, where he studied directing and ethnomusicology, and staged productions of The Winter’s Tale and The Ruling Class. In the spring 2010 he will direct O Lovely Glowworm at ACT in San Francisco and The Rivals for NYU/Grad Acting.