![]() ![]() “That snowballs into a revolution, and a leader is unseated as a result,” Ali says. In Richard II, a man has been killed, and people are upset that nothing is being done about it. That said, the action of the play isn’t entirely irrelevant to our lives right now. (To keep the conversation going, interviews with the cast, creative team, and some literary scholars will accompany each night’s episode.) “So I brought those questions and those musings into the rehearsal.” What followed was “a really heartfelt, honest, brutal conversation” about how art and activism could peacefully coexist. “The weekend before our first rehearsal, I wondered, Should we be doing this? Is it the right time for us to be engaging with this dead, white, British playwright’s work? We should be out on the streets,” he says. “I had assembled the cast of primarily BIPOC actors, and this had been my intention from before in my work, it’s crucial that a person of color is at the center of the narrative,” says Ali. Then, there was the real-world socio-political context to contend with: Rehearsals for Richard II started the week after George Floyd’s death, when protests for racial justice were happening all over the globe. “It’s really the construction of the organic, whereas in regular theater, repetition affords a discovery of the organic.” “I had to be much more prescriptive and descriptive, and have my ear on the whole, as opposed to what was happening in the moment,” he says. “WNYC sent equipment to all of their homes, so they became their own technicians, and after each session they had to upload their files onto Dropbox.” To then stitch everything together-an endeavor that was still ongoing when we spoke-felt more cinematic than inherently theatrical. ![]() “We have 25 actors, and their ages range from eight years old to 92,” Ali says. Everything happened over Zoom from the first, full read-through to recording. When the verse is irregular, the character is out of rhythm, and when the character is out of rhythm, there’s a reason why.”īut if the medium simplified the storytelling, social distancing complicated the process considerably. “What a wonderful way to discover the textures and meanings and layers, through sound and sound alone-no blocking, no costumes, no lights.” In Shakespearean verse, she continues, “the way in which the accents fall reveal the emotional, mental, psychological state and intention of the character. ![]() “What a wonderful way to enter the work,” she says. It required, in other words, an entirely different dramatic approach-one that proved illuminating for Rashad, who last appeared at the Public in Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Head of Passes in 2016. So I set the scene in a hospital, and added the sound of a flat line.” A narrator, voiced by Lupita Nyong’o, does the job of much of the visual cuing that he’d devised for the Delacorte contributing useful bits of context that Ali describes as footnotes. “He walks off, and someone comes back and says, ‘Gaunt just died.’ I thought, This is on the radio. “There are two things that happen offstage in the play, and one is the death of Gaunt ,” Ali says. “It doesn’t rhyme all the time, but it’s poetry from start to end.” He also leaned into the format’s efficiency. To normalize the languages’s rhythms, Ali first encouraged the actors to speak in their natural accents Richard II “is one of only a few Shakespeare plays written entirely in verse,” he says. “I love André,” he says, “but I did not know the play at all.” “Oskar Eustis had been in conversation with André Holland, who really loves Richard II,” Ali recalls. Needless to say, when director Saheem Ali-who brought Anna Deveare Smith’s Fires In The Mirror to the Signature Theater last year-was tapped for the project in December, he had little idea what he was in for. After its premiere, the work will exist online as a podcast. Hyman as Bolingbroke, and Phylicia Rashad as the grieving Duchess of Gloucester. Originally intended to appear at the Delacorte Theater in May (with As You Like It following in mid-summer), the history play will be broadcast nightly at 8:00pm from July 13 to 16, with André Holland as the embattled King Richard II, The Chi’s Miriam A. In an inspired adaptation to the times, Shakespeare in the Park becomes Shakespare on the Radio next week, as the Public Theater and WNYC team up for a serialized production of Richard II.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |