There are good reasons why Richard II, the first play in William Shakespeare’s Henriad tetralogy, is less frequently performed than its successors, the two Henry IV plays (revived this past spring at Theatre for a New Audience) and Henry V. While the Henry plays center on a nepo-baby who sheds his dissolute ways to become a battle-hardened leader worthy of the crown, Richard II devotes itself to a indecisive monarch who fritters away his power to an ambitious rival he has exiled without actually killing off.
In director Craig Baldwin’s handsome but hollow new Red Bull Theater production at Astor Place Theatre, though, Richard is presented as more of a petulant partying man-child than a tragic figure who realizes too late how he has let his kingdom slip from his grasp. Michael Urie casts a strikingly regal figure as the Richard, injecting the Bard’s poetry with an intelligence and admirable deftness. But he’s hampered by Baldwin’s curious adaptation and a conceptual framework that sets the action in the 1980s where characters move about the Arnulfo Maldonado’s Es Devlin-style fishbowl set in shoulder-padded costumes of the era (by Rodrigo Muñoz).
Baldwin paints some pretty stage pictures on the narrow stage that recently showcased the Blue Man Group, which are enhanced by Jeanette Oi-suk-Yew’s lighting and Brandon Wolcott’s disco-ready sound design. But you may find yourself wishing that he had been more ruthless in streamlining the text, dispensing with comedic scenes that no longer generate laughs, and making clearer why he’s chosen the ’80s time period and given Richard a queer sensibility. He shows off his lankily buff torso in a bathhouse-style sauna scene, repeatedly locks lips with the twinky Duke of York’s son Aumerle (David Mattar Merten), but also maintains an affectionate if brotherly relationship with his wife, the Queen (Lux Pascal).
Should we chalk up Richard’s indecisiveness as a ruler to the distractions of bathhouses and nightclubs — where Aumerle croons the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” as if to underscore the king’s self-induced isolation into a fantasy world? Then why also change the original ending so that it is Aumerle (rather than an ambitious aristocrat named Sir Piers Exton) who actually dispatches an imprisoned Richard with a dagger to the heart in the final scenes? The curious message seems to be that a monarch plunging into a gay demimonde can throw him off balance and lead directly to his demise. That’s a curiously retro framework for a production that tries so hard to seem contemporary and hip at just about every turn.
As the exiled rebel leader who rallies troops against Richard in an ultimately successful effort to depose him (and become King Henry IV), Grantham Coleman cuts a militant figure without leaving much of an impression of what drives him beyond raw ambition. Ron Canada brings a solid professionalism to his two roles, as Henry’s ailing father, John of Gaunt, and to a stiff-necked bishop who looks the other way at Richard’s homoerotic dalliances but staunchly defends his divine claim to the throne even as he launches a poorly timed attack on Ireland. The one true standout in the cast is Kathryn Meisle as the Duke of York, whose instinct for survival allows her to be ever malleable on principles as the political winds shift around her. She casts a figure that will look familiar to any watcher of cable news seeing a senator or cabinet official adjust to changed circumstances as if they were merely unbuttoning their suit jacket after a long lunch.
But this Richard II emerges more as an exercise in style than substance, unable to justify why its 1980s glosses enhance our understanding of this story or these characters. “I have been studying how I may compare / This prison where I live unto the world,” Richard says in the opening and closing lines of the show. And Urie fills the lines with a kind of weary resignation that marks his approach to his drawn-out abdication in the second act. But this production fails to make clear how Richard himself is chiefly responsible for his incarcerated fate, the architect of his own misfortune. (And it has nothing to do with his prolonged smooches with a boy.) ★★★☆☆
RICHARD II
Astor Place Theatre, Off Broadway
Running time:
Tickets on sale through November 30 for $70 to $484
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