At five and a half hours including a dinner break, Rose Rage, Edward Hall and Roger Warren’s two-part adaptation of Henry VI, is an epic chronicle of ambition, intrigue, and above all bloodshed. For his staging Hall, the director, chose as his conceptual metaphor a slaughterhouse. As the War of the Roses rages center stage at Chicago Shakespeare, a menacing chorus of cutlery-wielding butchers waits on the perimeter, scraping and sharpening knives. At every performance two red cabbages, representing the heads of condemned prisoners, are shattered with a mighty sweep of the executioner’s ax. As other scheming nobles meet ever more gruesome ends, the ensemble chops and hacks away at 20 pounds of raw organ meats.
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“I was first asked to provide lungs, hearts, and intestines,” says Smith, who worked out the details with help from props manager Dan Nurczyk. “The lungs look good on the cutting tables. And the hearts are very important because there is a part in the show where a heart is supposed to be ripped from a body. We learned, after several calls to butcher shops, that not all of them handle innards or even do their own slaughtering on the premises. So we turned to wholesale meat distributors.” They in turn referred her to Park Packing, a Back of the Yards pig slaughterhouse.
Once they’d settled on the right quantity–80 pounds a week, at a dollar a pound–the next task was to figure out what to do with it. “Since the meat is not for consumption, most of the health codes associated with food handling don’t apply to us,” says Smith. Still, they didn’t want it to smell or contaminate the theater. “We talked about where would be the safest place to store and prepare the meat,” says Nurczyk. “It had to be both far away from people, but still close enough to the stage to access at all times.” Eventually they installed a food service size refrigerator in the trap room under the stage.
The audience, on the other hand, is supposed to feel uncomfortable–but not so uncomfortable that they can’t eat. In between the two parts of Rose Rage, theatergoers have the option of buying a box dinner from CST’s caterers. On opening night a rumor circulated that the boxes had originally included a rare roast beef option but that the caterers had rethought their decision after seeing the show. “I have heard no such stories,” says Nurczyk. “But considering that the stage is covered in red cabbage just before the dinner interval, I think it’s funny that the salad in the vegetarian lunch has red cabbage in it.”
