Theatre in Review: Richard III (New York Shakespeare Festival/Delacorte Theatre)

	Danai Gurira. Photo: Joan Marcus

We've had some great productions of Richard III in recent years, along with some really terrible ones, but none have been as conflicted as Robert O'Hara's staging at the Delacorte. It's a mass of warring impulses, both high-concept and deeply conventional, eager to make a statement but lacking anything meaningful to say. A handful of strong supporting performers do their best to keep this rudderless ship on course, but nobody should have to work that hard, not on a warm summer's night in Central Park.

The marquee feature is the casting of Danai Gurira as crookback Richard, who covets the English throne and will eliminate anyone standing in his way. As if to confirm the character's ruthlessness, O'Hara has borrowed a scene from Henry VI, Part III, in which Richard murders the king, paving the way for his brother, Edward IV, to take the crown. (So much for family feeling; Richard will soon be planning to get rid of Edward, too). It's an unnecessary, if mildly provocative, idea -- Richard III is hardly deficient in villainy -- but at least it suggests a directorial mind at work.

Counterintuitively, Gurira's Richard is a strapping fellow, lacking the hunched shoulders and withered arm that define him and provide the motivation for his crimes. If anything, costume designer Dede Ayite and hair and wig designer Nikiya Mathis make him into something of a medieval style setter. This leads to a certain confusion: When Richard, stewing about his deformations, says, "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," one can't help thinking: What is he going on about?

Interestingly, O'Hara has cast several actors with physical challenges. Monique Holt, who plays the Duchess of York, is Deaf, as are one or two other members of the ensemble. Gregg Mozgala, double-cast as Edward IV and Richmond, has cerebral palsy. Ali Stroker, the production's Lady Anne, uses a wheelchair. Several roles are taken by Matthew August Jeffers, who has dwarfism. The inversion of the conventional setup is a fresh idea, underlining the frailty of Edward's factionalized, compromised court in the face of Richard's ruthless manipulations.

But if this is O'Hara's intention, he undermines himself with his elaborately dressed and generally conventional staging. Even more strikingly, he has pretty much left his actors to fend for themselves, with wildly varying results. Gurira's performance is the biggest puzzler; she has major problems with vocal production, relying on a head voice that grows increasingly shrill. Hers is a performatively evil interpretation, relying on a one-size-fits-all line reading absent any shading or nuance. (Even as Richard slips into homicidal paranoia, Gurira barely seems to change.) Richard is an extraordinarily complex role in recent years interpreted as a Fascist power player, a black comedian, and a study in psychopathology. Gurira, taking the least interesting route, delivers a monotonous, nuance-free killing machine.

This approach is felt most dismayingly when Richard brazenly woos Lady Anne as she attends to the disposal of Henry VI's corpse. This encounter, in which Richard, who killed Anne's husband, subtly turns her cold fury into acquiescence (and, perhaps, attraction), may be the most intense game of psychological chess in the Shakespearean canon. Here, it is reduced to a screaming match, with Stroker matching Gurira in volume, and the most obvious sort of comedy: When Richard puts a ring on Anne's finger, she flashes it with the mercenary satisfaction of Lorelei Lee. The scene is a flat-out disaster, bereft of its customary shivers.

There are other misconceived performances, not least Heather Alicia Simms, who reductively makes Queen Elizabeth, wife of Edward, into a sassy, sarcastic Real Housewife of Windsor. Fortunately, several members of the supporting cast can take care of themselves. One's interest spikes whenever Sharon Washington appears as Queen Margaret; prowling the stage with a walking stick that conceals a sword, she is a stately, baleful oracle, calling down curses on her enemies. Washington, who once appeared at the Delacorte as Lady Anne to Denzel Washington's Richard, is easily the most compelling presence onstage. Holt brings tremendous dignity to the Duchess of York, who looks on in horror as Richard, her son, turns on his brothers. Her signing is eloquent, and when another actor, speaking for her, says, "So many miseries have crazed my voice/That my woe-wearied tongue is still and mute," a profound silence follows. It's the closest this production comes to a show-stopping moment.

Other solid turns are provided by Sanjit De Silva as Buckingham, Richard's henchman, destroyed in a moment of hesitation; Michael Potts as a well-spoken Lord Stanley, and the increasingly impressive Daniel J. Watts, smoothly reptilian as the hatchet man Ratcliffe. The reliable Mozgala (who appeared at the Public in Teenage Dick, a high-school version of Richard III) delivers as the weary and guilt-ridden Edward and the appalled, vengeful Richmond.

Still, the production lacks momentum and a creeping sense of evil. With each of Richard's acts, one should feel a depth charge of terror; a kingdom, riddled with intrigue and preyed upon by a monster, is coming apart. None of this is on offer at the Delacorte, nor are we brought into a discomfiting intimacy with Richard and his schemes. Lacking any moral calculus, the play devolves into a series of squalid encounters, many of them played for easy laughs.

Even the design seems at war with itself. Myung Hee Cho's set consists of a dozen slightly curved, sail-shaped pieces; their constant reconfiguration, via the set's turntable, suggests the labyrinth in which the characters are trapped. Alex Jainchill's lighting deftly reconfigures the stage, often in the blink of an eye; employing smoke and saturated red washes, he achieves some notably infernal looks. Ayite's sumptuous, intensively detailed costumes would work in another, more traditional production; here, they feel out of sync with the starkly modern scenic concept. She also tosses in the odd, contemporary detail -- for example, the young princes imprisoned by Richard sport spangly, gold high-top sneakers -- to jarring effect. Elisheba Ittoop's music is solid, and her sound design is admirably clear.

This is surely the right time for Richard III; Shakespeare's understanding of power politics never goes out of style, and we are certainly experiencing season after season of discontent. (Seen on the day that Boris Johnson's government was going down, it certainly resonated.) But this is a production with no real stakes, overseen by a Richard stripped of his menace. Its ambitions are meager, its achievements too few. Both as drama and a mirror held up to the current political chaos, it represents a lost opportunity. --David Barbour