Directors facing William Shakespeare revivals nowadays are very aware that whatever play they’re taking on has been handled who-knows-how-many-times before. The immediate challenge is to find a fresh angle.
Fearlessly approaching the early (1592 or 1593) but typically bloody Richard III, Robert O’Hara has discovered a hot one. With the valuable help of designer Dede Ayite, he does it in sumptuous period costumes. Not in modern dress. In 2022 that’s breaking news.
A second — or maybe a second and third — innovation is not so praise-worthy. It’s how he chooses to begin his Richard III. Shakespeare knowledgeables expect the tragedy to kick off with perhaps Shakespeare’s most famous opening speech, the one where the scheming, hate-ridden Duke of Gloucester gloats, “Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this sun of York.”
O’Hara has another idea. Putting off the insinuating soliloquy, he opts for depicting the demise of one of Richard’s victims. Has he decided to skip Richard’s chilling peroration altogether, a Bardolater might worry and wonder?
No. Richard appears soon enough in the form of Danai Gurira to deliver the potent introductory aside. Phew! Or maybe not so phew! O’Hara’s Richard shows up with no physical deformity — no misshapen hump or crooked leg. Apparently, this conniving court schemer’s deformity is strictly interior. He’s mentally deformed. Outwardly, this strutting Duke, as embodied by the perfectly adept Gurira (star of Black Panther and The Walking Dead , author of the Broadway play Eclipsed), is a dude.
Not so fast, director O’Hara (author of Bootycandy, director of Slave Play and Gurira’s In the Continuum). It’s one thing to imagine a handsome protagonist for a jaunty spin on a character whom audiences have loved to hate for more than four hundred years. It’s quite another to ignore Richard’s indisputably specific descriptions of himself.
Richard explicitly declares he’s “Cheated of feature by dissembling nature/Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time/Into this breathing world, scarce half made up.” When he insists he’s not “made to court an amorous looking-glass,” he’s not saying that when he looks at a mirror, he spots his deranged mental state. He’s saying he confronts a body “not shaped for sportive tricks.”
So, what’s a reviewer to make of O’Hara’s wrong-headed directorial maneuver? Perhaps that O’Hara is so set on lodging whatever points he wants to lodge with his Richard III that he’s prepared to contradict (betray?) the script.
Therefore, short of dismissing the entire enterprise in the first few minutes, there’s no alternative for a reviewer but to accept the director’s crucial initial gaffe and continue watching in hopes of more felicitous innovations, ideas more illuminating, entertaining, humorous. Richard himself is a bailiwick of dark humor, a true stand-up comic, though not always while plotting the assassinations of anyone standing between him and the throne he covets and then can’t sustain.
O’Hara’s best inspiration occurs at the second-act opener, when Richard, pretending not to want the crown — a sly bit of applied reverse psychology — greets his unsure public flanked by two somber clergymen. The director places the three on the Delacorte bleachers. Offered the kingly post several times but demurring, this Richard, as Gurira nicely plays him, is self-deprecatingly coy. The effect is that the Delacorte audience surrounding Richard becomes his cast of delighted thousands.
Among other well-conducted sequences is the final battle wherein the horseless Richard is slain by Richmond (the well-spoken Gregg Mozgala). Since Shakespeare’s on-stage battle scenes rarely have the wherewithal that films customarily receive, they’re usually stylized. O’Hara’s sleek stylization is greatly enhanced by Myung Hee Cho’s set, Alex Jainchill’s masterful lighting, Elisheba Ittoop’s sound and heated original music.
Cho’s set, as evocative of any Shakespeare in the Park set over the six decades, consists of 10 tall and narrow, suggestively Gothic arches that also conjure thoughts of menacing spearheads. Many of them are placed on a turntable frequently set in motion, as they are when Richard’s ultimate encounter begins. It may be that Cho’s contribution is the production’s outstanding element.
About additional O’Hara innovations: He does seem to be guided by this year’s director’s playbook, including long overdue recognitions of an expanded, diversified acting community. This registers as a positive, contemporary sign.
The acting in this Richard III is a mixed Shakespearean bag. Too many in the cast don’t understand that Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter shrewdly mimics everyday conversational delivery. Some of these players don’t so much speak English as they render — that’s to say, declaim — what they must consider proper Shakespeare sounds. It hardly ever occurs to too many of this ensemble – or to O’Hara? — that some of the most effective conspiratorial plots are discussed in hushed tones.
Throughout two-and-three-quarter-hour (one intermission) production, the most accomplished performance comes from Sharon Washington as mad Queen Margaret. She‘s so strong, so commanding while spilling curses on everyone during her first scene that at her exit she receives spontaneous applause.
It’s as if spectators suddenly recognize first-rate acting and want to express gratitude for it. Others showing forceful acting mettle are Sanjit De Silva as the betrayed Buckingham and Paul Niebanck as doomed George. Ali Stroker, a Tony winner for the recent Oklahoma! revival, plays the furiously widowed but ultimately malleable Anne as if she hasn’t entirely abandoned Ado Annie’s personality.
Shakespeare regularly used his tragedies and histories as comments on his period’s politics. The point of classics is that they serve as reflections of any period. Yes, Richard III’s sociopathic lies are pertinent to ours, but there’s no need to jimmy a text to say so.
Richard III opened July 10, 2022, at the Delacorte Theater and runs through July 17. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
