LA WEEKLY
FEBRUARY 15 - 21, 2002
by Steven Leigh Morris
Good news: Circus Theatricals hasn't turned Shakespeare's hunchback
toad, Richard III, into Osama bin Laden (though doubtless some genius
will bring that concept to fruition in the next year or two). Rather,
with the help of costume designer Emelle Holmes' bowler hats, double-breasted
suits and posh military coats, director Casey Biggs sets the play
afloat in England at some point between the world wars. But if Biggs'
staging couldn't be less topical, actor Jack Stehlin's impish interpretation
of the outcast's wit, venom, duplicity and doom couldn't be more relevant
- particularly if you have any interest at all in how the poison in
one spiteful leader's heart can seep like sludge into the body politic.
Biggs' strategic transplanting of Richard III into a dubiously defined
yesteryear of English history generously allows us enough mental fly
space to project the Duke of Gloucester's villainy onto whatever modern
terrorist, dictator, president or prime minister we please. Biggs
takes the partisan out of politics and keeps things, well, classic.
The last time Richard III lurched across these very boards (the current
production opened last week at the Odyssey Theater) was in 1999, in
the person of English - man Steven Berkoff and his solo show Shakespeare's
Villains. Dick 3 was just one of many Shakespearean creeps who were
united into Berkoff's bulging-eyed gargoyle demeanor, menacing basso
profundo and cleanly enunciated iambic pentameter. Berkoff was joking,
sort of, ribbing the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company
and its thespian delegates (Laurence Olivier, Ian McKellen and Patrick
Stewart) for sundry vanities and overacting - the same qualities on
which Berkoff has also staked his theatrical career, albeit with tongue
in cheek. I don't know if Stehlin saw that perform ance, but his Richard
III seems a reaction against Berkoff's melodramatic lampoon, cutting
against the grain of the role's ancient trunk. Stehlin's eyes twinkle
rather than glower - were they not framed by a circle of black makeup,
he'd be indistinguishable from Puck. His hunchback nicely tucked into
a dandy striped cotton shirt, he cavorts rather than clomps, all the
while winking at the audience. In the entertaining Act III, scene
VII, when - with the mayor and clergy present and organ music playing
softly in the background - Richard yields to the insistence of Buckingham
(Alfred Molina) by "reluctantly" accepting the throne, so
nimble is Stehlin's posturing, so lighthearted his timbre, you might
check your program to see if you haven't accidentally wandered into
a production of Tartuffe. You might, that is, if Stehlin's glibness
hadn't turned so absolutely terrifying as the infanticidal scale of
his character's ambitions slowly unfolded. Playing it this way might
even have been a disastrous decision had Biggs not been sufficiently
attuned to the art of juxtaposition. Stehlin dances his frolicking
ballet on Jaret Sacrey's austere set - a trio of coffinlike platforms
and a trio of scaffolds, through each of which a blue light casts
an eerie hue on the latticed steel pipes. Occasional video backdrops
of crashing ocean waves or collapsing buildings appear on an upstage
wall already emblazoned in paint with twisted, spider-web branches
(lights and video by Tim Kiley). All this, along with sound designer
Paul Taylor Robertson's subliminal rumble, holds Richard's jocular,
murderous ascent in a precarious tonal balance between the thunderous
and the flippant.
The psychology of that ascent, however, makes less sense. In two similar
scenes at opposite ends of the play, Richard woos women who've been
bereaved thanks to him. In Act I, he stumbles onto Lady Anne (Allison
Marich) during a funeral procession for her husband, Edward, Prince
of Wales, who was murdered by the man now seducing her in the presence
of the corpse. Later, in Act IV, after having arranged for and overseen
the assassination of the two child princes who jeopardized his designs
on the throne, now-King Richard III approaches their mother, Queen
Elizabeth (Jill Gascoine), and, in the midst of her grief, asks for
the hand of her daughter. In each of these black-magic scenes, the
royal women wail out their protestations before succumbing with a
snap, as though Richard had turned a light switch on - or off - in
their hearts. But where the perversity of their surrender rings horrifically
true, the absence of any apparent emotional tug and pull leaves the
viewer less than convinced. The larger consequence is that if Richard
gets his way through strategies that lack believability, his entire
rise and fall starts to appear artificial. In a harrowingly beautiful
scene, Richard's mother, the Duchess of York (Strawn Bovee), spits
the sort of curses on him that should be any son's undoing. Bovee's
delivery couldn't be more eloquent or scathing, but here it bounces
off Richard's Teflon skull and lands on the floor between them. Later,
therefore, when his army forsakes him on Bosworth Field and Stehlin
proffers teary laments, you have to wonder where such feelings come
from, and what we're supposed to do with them. Some of the conceptual
devices are similarly perplexing. Gascoine's textured Elizabeth and
Molina's droll Buckingham both speak with English accents - but the
queen sounds like a queen from Buckingham Palace, Buckingham like
a car salesman from Hackney, and everyone else is clearly from the
States. If this is supposed to signify something, I'm lost. Similarly,
Neil Vipond's emotive crone Queen Margaret and the female Nickella
Dee Schlanger's kid prince lend a gender-bent symmetry of male and
female, young and old - intriguing, yes, but does it work to some
larger purpose?
Despite such impediments, Biggs focuses the drama both visually and
in language so richly channeled that his production is eminently watchable,
at times inspired. When ailing King Edward IV (Eric Pierpoint) gathers
the warring clans around his divan and calls for unity and love among
them before he dies, Stehlin's Richard nods sagely in a silent, sarcastic
testament to quixotic peace processes through the centuries - feathers
adrift in a world of mortar and steel. |
