[In the following review of Ron Daniels's 1993 back-to-back staging of Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, Brantley examines the director's anachronistic American Civil War setting and comments on the overall lack of cohesion in the dramas.]

Talk about generation gaps. In Ron Daniels's lively but erratic staging of both parts of Shakespeare's Henry IV at the American Repertory Theater, the King and his wayward heir, Hal, appear to be separated by about 130 years.

The rebellious Prince is here portrayed as a platinum-haired punk who resembles the English rock star Billy Idol; his father, looking like a mustachioed general from a Matthew Brady daguerreotype, clearly belongs to the era of America's Civil War. Arduously stretching the liberties afforded by post-modernist theories of production, Mr. Daniels has created a wildly anachronistic, culturally mixed salad in which different elements of Shakespeare's epic political portrait are accorded theatrical analogues from wholly disparate historical moments.

The result, given visual life by John Conklin's time-traveling, slightly ragged scenic shorthand, is less disjunctive than one might expect. But the plays also have the didactic aspect of something prepared by a relevance-stressing schoolteacher who has asked his class to come up with a familiar historical parallel for each segment and then has staged them all accordingly.

There is a broader logic to this approach. Robert Scanlan, the theater's literary director, has said that in the original plays Shakespeare was consciously mixing his tale of a 15th-century rebellion with contemporary Elizabethan material (in his portrayal of Hal and his carousing cronies). And throughout the sprawling course of the two plays, Mr. Daniels, like an Olympian time juggler, keeps pushing the images of martial history forward (the look of the battle scenes shifts from the Civil War to World War I), so that by the end we have arrived in a world of cool, 20th-century Realpolitik.

All the same, the productions are far stronger in isolated parts than as a whole. As the director Gus Van Sant demonstrated in his film My Own Private Idaho, the story of the maverick, hedonistic Hal and his debauched mentor, Falstaff, can be translated quite effortlessly into contemporary terms. And with sprightly teamwork from Bill Camp and Jeremy Geidt as Hal and Falstaff, the scenes of sybaritic lowlife in Eastcheap taverns spring into a roisterous animation that pulses with surprising moments of psychological revelation.

But fitting the clash of the troubled regime of the aging Henry IV and the insurrectionists who would dethrone him within the imagistic context of the War Between the States is far, far more strained. The power struggle in Henry IV is among duplicitous individuals with their own Machiavellian agendas, something that is less than clear in both the specific performances and in Mr. Daniels's literal-minded piling on of 19th-century correspondences. For example, Glendower, the mystical Welsh rebel (Herb Downer), is presented as an American Indian. It is the sort of interpolation that has you scrambling to justify its inclusion. (Is Glendower a Yankee or a Confederate?) Ultimately, it is merely distracting.

Worse, as portrayed by Alvin Epstein, Henry IV is presented as a blustery, dyspeptic dinosaur, a sort of Colonel Blimp whose day is long past. The canny, manipulative politician—the named Bolingbroke in Richard II, who himself represented a rupture with the medieval tradition of kingship—doesn't seem to exist here. Nor, correspondingly, does the disturbing evolution of the spontaneous Hal into the calculating image of his father.

The king and his heir are here clearly meant to embody old and new orders of statesmanship. (Their scenes together are usually played with a great physical distance between them.) This reduces an extremely complex bond to a more obvious generational clash.

All that said, Mr. Daniels keeps the plays moving briskly and entertainingly as he leapfrogs the centuries. And if he sacrifices much of the work's graver historical import until the second part's icy conclusion, he is often able, in the scenes involving Hal and Falstaff, to find not only the humor but also a rich psychological subtext.

As played by Mr. Camp, a deeply histrionic actor, Hal is, well, a deeply histrionic actor, a young man who has spent his life watching politicians perform and is himself trying on various parts to see if they fit. In this sense, he is ably abetted by Mr. Geldt's solid if unsurprising Falstaff, who in his own clearsighted, self-serving way is the most sophisticated of role-playing fantasists. And the first of the Eastcheap tavern scenes (designed by Mr. Conklin as a low-rent after-hours club overseen by a saucy, transvestite Mistress Quickly, played by Remo Airaldi), in which the pair take turns playing Hal and his father, is the illuminating high point of both plays.

For the first half of Part 1, politics are simply a game to Hal.

But confronted with the grimmer realities of war, he is increasingly consumed by both a heady infatuation with power and a subliminal fear of its consequences. In fact, as a whole, Mr. Daniels's “Henry” works best as a study in lost illusions. Part 1 exudes a feeling of adolescent exuberance; Part 2 gives off the sour, stale sense of the hangover that follows excess. Accordingly, Hotspur (Royal Miller), Hal's archrival in Part 1, is played less as a fierce embodiment of medieval blood lust and honor than a slow-witted, happy-go-lucky kid, whose death represents less the end of an era than the dark casualties of war.

And the Eastcheap scenes, which in Part 1 abounded in gleeful high spirits, in Part 2 give off a frenzied feeling of anarchy sliding into violence. (Maggie Rush's Doll Tearsheet and Benjamin Evett's Pistol seem like toxically brain-fried refugees from a heavy-metal entourage.) Mr. Geldt's Falstaff becomes increasingly weary and stiff jointed, and in the scenes that bring him together with the senile friend of his youth, Justice Shallow, played by William Young as a wheezy, corn-pone rustic in an “American Gothic” setting, he seems truly to hear the chimes at midnight. He is a spent man even before his banishment.

There is little argument today that the two parts of Henry IV are Shakespeare's political masterpiece, works in which, as Kenneth Tynan wrote, “a whole nation is under scrutiny and on trial.” With his mixed historical metaphors and uneven cast, Mr. Daniels never achieves a cohesive formula that can comfortably encompass that vast perspective.

But as irritating as some of its devices can seem, the production does generate an infectious, gung-ho energy and a variety of pacing that hold one's attention throughout the nearly six hours of back-to-back viewing of the plays. That in itself, of course, is some sort of epic achievement.