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A "Richard III" For The Moment

Magda Lena Griffel | August 27th, 2024

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Edgerton Park  |  Elm Shakespeare Company  |  Arts & Culture  |  Theater  |  Youth Arts Journalism Initiative

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Lisa Wolpe as Richard III in Richard III. The production in Edgerton Park runs Tuesdays through Sundays through September 1. Isabel Chenoweth Photos.

Under the blue supermoon, the stage in Edgerton Park was filled with smoke, tinted blue and red by the stage lights. A drumline thrummed. Actors wielding swords emerged from the shadows, drawing their weapons. As they filled the space, they began to stab each other in a bloody, clanging mess.

That’s how Richard III begins, and also how it ends two hours later, as Elm Shakespeare mounts the production in Edgerton Park this month. Directed by Rebecca Goodheart with Lisa Wolpe in the titular role, the show runs Tuesdays through Sundays through Sept. 1. As it plays out in New Haven, it becomes a trenchant and pressing way to speak to the current moment in the world. 

Performances run Tuesdays through Sundays at 7:30 p.m. and are free; more information is available here

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Isabel Chenoweth Photos.

“Shakespeare figured out that extended violence does not create people who have an aversion to violence. It creates more violent people, and so the atrocities get bigger and bigger and harder and harder to forgive,” said Goodheart, producing artistic director with Elm Shakespeare. “I'm not talking just about America. I'm talking about Gaza. I'm talking about Ukraine, I'm talking about all over the world. We're living in a time that feels like the violence is getting harder and harder to come back from.”

That violence is central to Richard III, and the way that Elm Shakespeare and Wolpe especially have chosen to tell it. As she prepared for another summer in the park, Goodheart chose the play after many years of presenting the Bard’s more comedic pieces, including more contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare’s 16th-century writings like Romeo & Juliet. In part, the work spoke to her, defying any timestamp with its understanding that violence will beget more violence.  

“It was time to swing a little bit back to a little more serious, a little more history, and to do something a little more ‘traditional’—even though I don't like that term,” she said. 

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Isabel Chenoweth Photos.

Richard III does exactly that. Between the clang of swords, a story unfolds of the eponymous (and very real historical figure) Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who ultimately ruled England for two bloody, turbulent years in the final decades of the 15th century. Shakespeare weaves in the Wars of the Roses, a bloody, decades-long constellation of feuds within the British royal lineage. The period ended shortly after Richard III’s death in 1485, a historical touchpoint that becomes important to the show.

In the play, all of the characters are wracked with fear, including at points Richard (a masterful Wolpe) himself. Most are afraid of Richard’s wrath, driven by a thirst for power that knows no bounds. Rapacious, he is willing to chase widows (Caro Reyes Rivera as Lady Anne), imprison and murder his brother (Maconnia Chesser as the Duke of Clarence) and nephews, and kill off his lords to consolidate power and ascend to the throne.

Even when he does become King, he’s not done: this killing invites more killing, until only more death seems inevitable.   

Fear infects the audience too, because Richard III can be seen as an eerie mirror for our times. Tyrannical, power-hungry leaders, war, mistrust—none of that has gone away. In past years, Elm Shakespeare’s productions have been designed to make the audience laugh. This year, the audience's laughter comes from a place of disbelief—that this kind of demonic personality exists. That it can and does exist even beyond this one fictional character.

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Isabel Chenoweth Photos.

Even Richard has moments in which he is overtaken with terror, and these are some of the show’s richest.  Close to his end, the stage is drenched in blue light and his past victims slowly descend down the stairs of the set, ghostly. They encircle him as he sleeps, taunting him, and he starts awake, terrified, flighty. 

“What do I fear? Myself?” he proclaims. “There’s none else by … Is there a murderer here? No! Yes! I am. Then fly. What, from myself?” In the next scene, he is stabbed to death from all sides.

“Obviously it seems more brutal when you kill somebody with a sword, but you can kill a lot more people with poverty, and economic disparity and racial hatred and genocide,” Wolpe said in an interview with the Arts Paper. “Bigger cataclysms and that even Richard the Third can create in our world today.”

On a recent Tuesday night, the play was a kind of deliberate, bloody chaos—but chaos that the audience made an effort to follow. Shouts of “Ewww!” came from the audience in the scene between Richard and Anne (Reyes Rivera), as he asked the young widow to marry him. The two were on their way to mourn her husband, Edward VI, who he murdered. She spat on him, and the audience cheered. As he licked the spit from his hand, the audience shrieked in disgust.

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Isabel Chenoweth Photos.

Yet besides that heaviness, there was an undeniable joy. Elm’s Apprentice Company, which hires high school and college students to work on and behind the stage, ensured that several young actors were a highlight of the production. Mekhi Robinson, Willow Oliveira, Ray Cain, Ell Zirolli, and Cameron Muñoz all played multiple roles alongside union cast members, shape-shifting as characters and moving set pieces between scenes.

Around the stage, people of all ages gathered to see art, sharing a moment in space before the summer was over. Before the play started on Elm’s polished wooden playhouse, a few cast members broke into song, with a musical performance that had the audience clapping along. 

Onstage, Zirolli and Gregory Jon Phelps—who also played an array of characters—blended Radiohead’s “Creep”  with Olivia Rodrigo’s “Vampire.” During their cover of Britney Spears’ “Baby One More Time,” the audience echoed Phelps on the hook, singing the words “still believe!”

And even in the play, after Richard was killed and the Wars of the Roses ended, red and white factions joined hands. The entire remaining cast wore glowing smiles of relief. All was well, for now.

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From left, Kristin Wold, MaConnia Chesser, Caro Reyes Rivera, and Cynthia Decure. Isabel Chenoweth Photos.

In an interview, Wolpe called the role one of the greatest she’s ever played. Richard scowls, he leers, he wears self-satisfied grins, he leads with his nose. When he’s not plotting, he’s literally executing his plans: murdering family members and trying to manipulate their widows and sisters into marrying him. 

She noted how Richard, who was bullied and publicly shamed for physical deformities with which he was born, turns around to become a murderous tyrant. There’s something, perhaps, to be gleaned from that history, that hurt people only continue to hurt people.  

“I see in life, politics has become just as bloodthirsty and based on lies and deception,” she said. “So some things have never change … 500 years ago, they were using a Bible as a prop in a political moment and saying nasty things about people's backgrounds in order to disqualify them from rightful service. So I think it's good to kind of just tell a story that is very much about now, but doesn't take place in the here and now and then.”

“This is the kind of thing that I think is a wonderful tradition that brings people of all backgrounds the same pleasure in Shakespeare,” she added. 

Elm Shakespeare Company's production of Richard III runs Tuesdays through Sundays at Edgerton Park, 75 Cliff Street in New Haven, through Sept. 1. This article comes from the 2024 Cohort of the Youth Arts Journalism Initiative. Magda Lena Griffel is a recent graduate of Wilbur Cross High School, where she edited the school newspaper, and is headed to Columbia University in the fall.