How is Henry characterized in the first few pages

The opening of the play quick establishes the fluidity of time by flashing forward to a point in time in which an aged Ralph Waldo Emerson has trouble recalling even the name his old friend Henry David Thoreau. After this brief glimpse into the future, the audience is suddenly thrown back into the past (or the play’s “present”) when Henry is in his cell with his mother asking what he’s done. Then there is a shift back to Waldo in the future that seamlessly blends into a flashback of Waldo as a younger man giving a lecture which causes Henry to lapse momentarily into a kind of trance from which his brother’s appearance brings him and tosses both of them back into the past when Henry was growing disappointed with everything about Harvard except for the lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson.