Robert O’Hara’s Richard III is set among moving gothic arches (photo by Joan Marcus)
RICHARD III
Central Park, Delacorte Theater
Tuesday – Sunday through July 17, free, 8:00
publictheater.org
There’s a moment early on in Robert O’Hara’s Shakespeare in the Park production of Richard III that defines the rest of the play. When Richard (playwright and actor Danai Gurira), the Duke of Gloucester, is wooing Lady Anne (Ali Stroker) after having murdered her husband, the prince, and her father, the king, he gives her his dagger so she can kill him. “If thy revengeful heart cannot forgive, / Lo, here I lend thee this sharp-pointed dagger, / Which if thou please to hide in this true breast / And let the soul forth that adoreth thee, / I lay it naked to the deadly stroke / And humbly beg the death upon my knee—” Richard says. She plunges the dagger into his chest, but alas, it is merely a prop that Richard takes back and fake stabs himself with a few times.
Richard smiles and the crowd laughs, but it prepares us for a different kind of Richard III, and a different kind of Richard. The scene is key to the success of the play; if Richard can woo Lady Anne, who passionately despises him, then he can in turn win over the audience to root him on while he treacherously lays waste to anyone and everyone in his way on his journey to acquiring the crown.
Richard is usually portrayed by a white man with a humped back and a menacing limp. But here he is played by a Zimbabwean American woman, looking magnificent in black leather with gold details and a closely shaved head with ominous designs. There’s no limp and no hunch, recalling Jamie Lloyd’s recent staging of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac at the BAM Harvey, where a stunning James McAvoy wore no embarrassing proboscis, perhaps the hottest Cyrano in history.
So it’s a hard sell when Gurira admits, “I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks, / Nor made to court an amorous looking glass; / I, that am rudely stamped and want love’s majesty / To strut before a wanton ambling nymph; I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion, / Cheated of feature by dissembling nature, / Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time / Into this breathing world scarce half made up, / And that so lamely and unfashionable / That dogs bark at me as I halt by them.”
Ratcliffe (Daniel J. Watts) has some stern words with Richard III (Danai Gurira) in Shakespeare in the Park production (photo by Joan Marcus)
Despite that anomaly, we are with Gurira’s Gloucester from the very start, in a prologue taken from the third part of Henry VI as he stabs the king. Gurira’s monologues to the audience are not as intense as we are used to; this is a more likable Richard, and that works, for the most part. Gurira, who is well known as Michonne on The Walking Dead and Okoye in Black Panther and has appeared on Broadway in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and at the Delacorte in Measure for Measure, has a charismatic mystique as she marches across Myung Hee Cho’s minimalist set, consisting of eleven large gothic arches that rotate around the stage and occasionally flicker with colored lights. (The lighting is by Alex Jainchill, with fashionable costumes by Dede Ayite and sound and music by Elisheba Ittoop.)
But O’Hara (Slave Play, Barbecue), who has previously directed Gurira’s Eclipsed and The Continuum, never finds the right pace as the show labors through its two hours and forty minutes (with a twenty-minute intermission). We are too often waiting for something to happen instead of it just happening; the electricity rarely sparks.
There are stylish moments, but too many scenes feel like set pieces that stand on their own but do not flow into one another. Tony winner Stroker (Oklahoma! Spring Awakening) is lovely as Lady Anne, especially when she shows up later in a blinged-out wheelchair. Monique Holt (Cymbeline, Romeo & Juliet), who is deaf, adds a unique aspect to the Duchess of York, but not everything she signs is translated. One of the assassins, played by Maleni Chaitoo, is also deaf. And Rivers is portrayed by Matthew August Jeffers, who has a rare form of dwarfism.
Danai Gurira and Matthew August Jeffers rehearse in masks for Richard III (photo by Joan Marcus)
Interestingly, while Gurira’s Richard has no physical disabilities, Richmond and King Edward IV are played by Gregg Mozgala (Cost of Living, Merchant of Venice), who has cerebral palsy, which affects how he walks; Mozgala starred as a high school version of Richard III in Teenage Dick at the Public in 2018.
Sharon Washington (Feeding the Dragon Wild with Happy), who portrayed Lady Anne at the Delacorte in 1990, brings down the house as Queen Margaret, who sees through Richard immediately. She lets loose after declaring, “I can no longer hold me patient,” making us yearn for her return after she exits. The cast also features Sanjit De Silva as Buckingham, Skyler Gallun as the Prince of Wales, Paul Niebanck as George, Michael Potts as Lord Stanley, Ariel Shafir as Lord Hastings, Heather Alicia Simms as Queen Elizabeth, Matthew August Jeffers as a standout among the ensemble, and Daniel J. Watts as Catesby / Ratcliffe.
Richard III kicks off the sixtieth anniversary season of Shakespeare in the Park at the Delacorte; the inaugural presentation, in 1962, was The Merchant of Venice with George C. Scott as Shylock and James Earl Jones as the Prince of Morocco. Richard III has been staged at the Delacorte in 1966 with Philip Bosco, 1983 with Kevin Kline, and 1990 with Denzel Washington. Among the others who have portrayed the devious duke onstage are Scott, Laurence Olivier, Ian McKellen, Kevin Spacey, Al Pacino, Benedict Cumberbatch, Alec Guinness, Peter Dinklage, Mark Rylance, and Lars Eidinger, who was spectacular in Thomas Ostermeier’s adaptation at BAM in 2017. Gurira is a worthy addition to that list, even if the production itself leaves too much to be desired in a hopefully glorious summer.