Chicago Shakespeare’s “Richard III,” with Katy Sullivan/Photo: Liz Lauren
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In his opening speech, “Now is the winter of our discontent…” Shakespearean villain Richard III describes himself as “rudely stamp’d… Deformed, unfinished… scarce half made up.” Other characters call him an “infection” and a “poisonous bunch-backed toad.”
This all refers to Richard’s disability—once seen as a mark of evil and proven historically when the medieval king’s body was discovered beneath a Leicester parking lot in 2012. He had scoliosis, which causes curvature of the spine. In recent years, theaters have used disabled actors in the role. Casting Richard as a woman—considered a deformed man in antique thought—further sets him apart.
In his stylish, macabre but imperfect production of “Richard III” at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, new artistic director Edward Hall makes the inspired choice of Katy Sullivan for the title role—someone who’s both a Tony nominee and a Paralympian—Sullivan is a record-holder for the one-hundred-meter dash.
A bilateral amputee, Sullivan uses her prosthetic legs to startling effect in this unusual show. When she first appears and delivers the “winter of our discontent” soliloquy, Sullivan is not wearing prosthetics, but just sits on the stage, dressed in a plain, black coat and appearing helpless, if not for her defiant words. Early scenes are performed in a wheelchair.
As Richard’s body count and fortunes rise, Sullivan gets prosthetics of increasing beauty and formidability. By the battle scene, she is wearing running blades. Sullivan jumps up and down on them—showing that even with the odds against him, Richard is ready to fight.
While her physical performance is brilliant throughout, Sullivan’s vocal performance is less strong at the beginning of the show. She comes off in early scenes as peevish and unpleasant rather than seductively villainous.
Sullivan’s portrayal grows in power as the show goes on, and by the time she tells Buckingham (a charismatic Yao Dogbe) “I am not in the giving vein,” she crackles with frustrated rage. She has a terrific, cackling laugh—it rings out like the Wicked Witch of York whenever Richard is pleased with his own nastiness, and makes the audience laugh, too.
Chicago Shakespeare’s “Richard III,” with Katy Sullivan/Photo: Liz Lauren
Hall chose not to take “Richard” too seriously—it can be read as a comic horror story, and this production punches that up in Grand Guignol style. Characters are dispatched by a variety of methods—including death by drowning in a wine vat (in the script) and death by chainsaw (not), with blood spattering on a translucent curtain. In one grotesque bit of business, Richard bites off someone’s finger to retrieve a ring (with sound effects).
The costumes and scenery are marvelous—Michael Pavelka dresses characters in black, gray and white, in the early twentieth century style seen in Edward Gorey drawings. He uses mobile surgical screens and scaffolding for scenery, along with an operating table that functions as a throne, a tomb and a horse. The dead get zipped up, and abused, in black body bags. Non-speaking actors wear Victorian-style surgical gowns and bandaged faces, moving about like ghoulish orderlies behind the action. At the base of the scaffolding are piles of skulls.
Adding to the sense of starkness and doom is the music by Jon Trenchard, who mixes English madrigals (“Down, down, down among the dead men… ”) and Latin church music, like “Dies Irae” and “Piu Jesus,” using descending scales to echo Richard’s fall.
The humor becomes too broad and grotesque in the story of the little doomed princes. Instead of being performed by actual children or youthful adults, they are portrayed by puppets, manipulated and voiced by two actors in masks (Mark Bedard and Mo Shipley). This is bizarre and off-putting, and becomes more so after their murder, when the puppet heads are put in a jar, which Elizabeth (the excellent Jessica Dean Turner) clutches to mourn them. While it’s okay to laugh with Richard, we want to be sad about the princes, and this show doesn’t allow it.
The other actors in this production are all fine—including Sean Fortunato as both Rivers and the Duchess of York, Debo Balogun as Ratcliffe, and Libya V. Pugh as Queen Margaret—who casts her curses in grand old theatrical style, wringing out every drop of juice. As Lady Anne, Jaeda LaVonne (Viola in last fall’s wonderful “Twelfth Night”) and Sullivan manage to make their unlikely wooing scene make sense. And as poor George, Scott Aiello gives a thrilling rendition of the dream speech (“Methought what pain it was to drown…”) to the ominous plunk of dripping water. Bedard and Shipley play the murderers as comic vaudevillians, with Shipley channeling Charlie Chaplin, if the Little Tramp had been in the business of drowning dukes.
Overall, this is a fine, gutsy take on one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays. The real Richard was likely not as bad a fellow as Shakespeare makes him out to be—Shakespeare was flattering the Tudors, who were Richard’s enemies. But you don’t come to “Richard III” for history—you come for spectacle and gore, and Chicago Shakespeare delivers.
“Richard III” is on stage at Chicago Shakespeare Theater through March 3, 800 East Grand. Tickets available at chicagoshakes.com.
