Topsy-turvy down.

29 August 2002—At Impact Theatre, a central part of our mission is to produce work that will attract people who aren’t typically attracted to going to the theater (one of the only things on which I substantially disagree with my fellow Impactians is the spelling of theater; unlike my usual proclivities, I far prefer the American spelling). To that end, we usually produce new (or at least newish) plays that speak to the lives of our audience members, who are frequently in the younger ranges. So, roughly in the words of Josh Costello, the company’s founder and the dramaturg of our latest production, opening tomorrow night, what the fuck are we doing with Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part One?

Well, actually, we’re throwing it down like premium ice cream on a slab of marble, whacking the shit out of it with a couple of heavy metal paddles, and mixing in tasty bits of Richard II and Henry IV Part Two. The result is a brilliant concoction of rich language and timeless themes, finished off by some of the best fighting you're likely to see fifteen feet from your eyes.

One of the challenges, though, is that there’s a huge cast of characters, divided into three general camps: the royals, headed by Henry IV; the rebels, the Percys, led by Hotspur; and, off to the side, the denizens of the tavern, whose attentions focus on Prince Hal, the future Henry V. It’s sort of the irony of the play that it’s much less about Henry IV as it is about Henry V.

With all those characters (our cast, even though it was larger than ever, had to double in their roles), we had to keep the warring factions distinct. Melissa Hillman, the company’s artistic director and the director of our Henry IV, Part One: The Impact Remix (later truncated, given the presence of Part Two, to simply Henry IV: The Impact Remix), asked me to come up with logos for the two main camps.

We’d begun calling the play H4, a somewhat natural nickname given that we were going to give the play the action-movie treatment (cf T2). In my initial sketches, I started playing with the H, trying to give it something of a family crest look. I began to see that the lower-case h can be rotated to become the 4. It reminded me of the old calculator trick of entering 0.7734, then flipping the calculator upside down to reveal the message. (A progenitor, perhaps, of l33t 5p34k?)

The h-4 connection was exciting. One of the papers I most enjoyed writing in college was my analysis of Henry IV, Part One. In it I explored the various father-son relationships (I counted four, not all of them biological) and how relationships in the play often reflected each other. I was thrilled when I realized that the two crests could be such that all you had to do was turn each upside down to reveal the other. I had my initial idea for the poster.

These were the initial shapes of the symbols:

Though I was relieved that the sketch had translated decently to the computer, I thought they looked a little crude. I explored a more stylized direction:

I was happier with these, but they still felt unfinished. I also wanted to distinguish them slightly from each other. I didn’t want the audience to simply think it was the same symbol, haphazardly applied. So I gave them a little more dimension:

I was finally pleased with the symbols. There was now only one problem remaining, though it was something of a complete deal-breaker: it didn’t make sense to represent the rebels with a 4 symbol. I hate it when designers try to shoehorn a clever design into something in which it clearly doesn’t work. We had a fortuitous out, however: the rebels had the surname of Percy. Done correctly, a lower-case h, reflected horizontally, became an upper-case P.

This was the first attempt at an h-P mix:

The problem here, of course, was that I’d lost the symmetry of the characters. h and 4 can both be open-ended. I didn’t know how to resolve the issue, until I decided to try to have it both ways. I tried an even more stylized version that wasn’t necessarily clear whether it was closed or open. The result:

Finally. Those symbols would go on the costumes, as well as banners hoisted over the audience, which sits on either side of the action rather than a standard audience position. So we made it as though each half of the audience belonged to one camp or the other, and the audience members could look across the stage to their counterparts in the other camp. The banners look roughly like this:

I still had the posters to do, however. I decided to stick with the symbolism of reflection. Since the P symbol didn’t mean much in terms of the poster, I went back to the original h-4 mixture. I decided to do the poster in such a way that it wouldn’t be clear which way was the right way up.

We had taken a line of Henry’s from the play, “March all one way and be no more oppos’d,” to reflect the new order of the kingdom (and, to my view, not that much different than the U.S. political response in the wake of 9/11). We contrasted that line with one of Hotspur’s, “We shall o’erturn it topsy-turvy down,” which reflected what we wanted to do to the play.

I put Henry’s statement on top and Hotspur’s upside-down on the bottom. I also flipped the second part of the play’s title, to highlight the remix idea. I put in a subtle background of water reflecting clouds to call another sense of reflection. In what was probably my most unconventional move, I flipped the credits upside down, leaving the dates, location, phone number, etc. right side up. I had made the h larger than the 4, which was my only break from the x-y symmetry. I thought it would help viewers orient themselves to get the information they needed from the poster. It was never my intention to confuse viewers or piss them off; I hoped, instead, that they would be intrigued and be drawn into looking longer at the poster. Here was the first draft:

I think almost any other director would have turned me down flat concerning the upside-down credits. Most would have questioned the whole upside-downness to begin with. Melissa said her main concern was rather that it wasn’t fierce enough. This was going to be a badass fighting play, and we wanted to convey the swords somehow. The only other thing was that she thought that Hotspur’s line should be on “top.”

With a major overhaul of the look of the letters, a little tweaking and finessing of the different poster elements, and a more forceful palette, this ended up as the final draft:

Here’s the info about the play. See you at the theater.