“I think most of the time, we are watching people deal with extraordinary circumstances,” director Craig Baldwin tells a room full of actors in a midtown rehearsal space.
It’s an unseasonably warm Sunday afternoon in mid-October, and the group has gathered for their final rehearsal of Richard II before advancing to tech week at the Astor Place Theatre. After an off-book run-through of the show, they’ve changed into comfier clothes and are sitting, scripts and notebooks in hand, in the part of the room labeled “stage right,” eager for more feedback from their director.
“The humanness of [the play] is that we watch how all these different people deal with those things in a country that is falling apart,” Baldwin goes on. “What are the choices people make? Who is trying to make the country fall apart and who is trying to rebuild it?”
A day prior, New York’s massive “No Kings” protest had streamed down the avenue directly outside the building, giving an uncanny topicality to a play written over four centuries ago: In this room, a king is hanging on to his power for dear life.
Richard II isn’t a play that most lay audiences, particularly in America, know well. The first work in Shakespeare’s Henriad tetralogy, it dramatizes moments that preceded England’s tumultuous, multi-generational civil war. At its center are King Richard—played in this version by Michael Urie—who banishes his cousin Henry Bolingbroke (Grantham Coleman), seizes noble land, levies controversial taxes, and becomes incredibly unpopular through his mismanagement of kingdom resources. Eventually deposed and imprisoned by Bolingbroke, Richard—spoiler alert!—is murdered in prison.
The obvious thing would be to play Richard as aloof and petulant; he was only 10 when he ascended to power, after all. But this production “highlights how being king is not easy,” Urie tells me. (He and Baldwin go way back: They were a year apart at Juilliard, and more recently, Baldwin directed Urie in the Shakespeare Theater Company’s 2019 production of Hamlet.) His Richard, however smug and occasionally condescending, also manages to evoke some pity.
