Art by Peter Eichman

View the trailer! (requires Quicktime)

Directed by Joshua Engel
Produced by Jaki Demarest

January 23, 24, 30, and 31, 2004
8 PM
Sellers Theater
8000 Cherry Lane, Laurel, MD
Tickets $10/$8 for students and seniors

NOTE: Stage firearms are used in the performance of this play. Gunshots are loud.

Art by Jaki Demarest

The year is 1927. The York family have, after a long and brutal civil war, defeated the rival Lancaster family for control of England. Richard, the youngest York brother, crippled since birth, finds himself more suited to war than peace. The throne is too great a prize for him, or for what remains of the Lancaster family, to ignore, more important than friendship, money, or love. The war is not over for him, or for England.

The script

Picture Gallery

Director's notes

Richard III is a play about violence, concluding a long cycle of violence that Shakespeare began in Henry VI part 1. The War of the Roses has taken Richard's father, Richard Duke of York, and his brother Edmund, Earl of Rutland. The families have been at war for decades. Assassination is the expected route to the throne.

Into this world steps Richard. His harsh and difficult birth left his mother ruined and unable to love the crippled, ugly thing she had brought into the world. Unloved by his mother and believing no woman would ever love him, he has decided to play by the rules that the world has set up for him. He will receive his power through violence and deception. Richard has been raised to kill, and it is the best tool he knows.

If murder is the way to the most respected office in the land, he will murder. If possession of a woman will give him claim to that throne, he will seduce her, despite his own shortcomings. In fact, he will use them to his advantage: he manipulates Anne through her pity for his wretched state.

If his brothers stand between him and the throne, what binds him to them to prevent him from murdering them, if he can get away with it? Or with murdering children? It is all one and the same to him, and that's his ultimate downfall.

Everybody remembers the Princes in the Tower. It is the trait for which he is known best, after being a hunchback. It seems to mark the turning point in the play, where Richard gradually loses his ability to control. Buckingham is horrified at the murder, even though he is complicit in the deaths of nearly a dozen adults over the course of the play. It is the point in the play at which Richard's masterful control begins to slip, his supporters turn away from him, and he spirals quickly into destruction.

In the end, the York family turns even on itself, destroying every last member until the last dying member of the Lancaster family, Margaret, throws the last bomb, backing Henry Tudor to ultimately supplant the Plantagenet reign of England that had lasted for over three hundred years. A final murder brings to an end one English dynasty, and begins another.

The historical figure of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, is very different from the figure presented in Shakespeare's play. There is good reason to believe that Richard did not murder the young princes, and some writers have even suggested that they were murdered instead by Henry Tudor himself, grandfather of Queen Elizabeth.

The play is sometimes tweaked to make Richard less complicit in the murders, to resurrect an image of Richard that was created by Tudor historians to cement Henry's (somewhat dubious) claim to the throne. I treat this play instead as a piece of fiction. Richard was not a hunchback, but I accept Shakespeare's contention that he was. I accept Shakespeare's contention that Richard was responsible for nearly a dozen murders in the course of the play.

In all that violence, I find a kind of karmic retribution, perhaps the truest kind of revenge. There is hardly a figure in the play who has not profited by violence. Elizabeth is now queen of England for the murder of Henry. Edward achieved his throne the same way. Clarence uses murder to repent for his betrayal. Margaret kept her throne for as long as she did by murdering Richard's father and brother. The Yorkist supporters have earned peerages. All accept the contention that violence is the way things are done. None has stepped up to condemn any murder except to swear revenge.

Until Richard. When violence is power, unlimited violence is unlimited power.

I have made several choices in this production if Richard III. First, I have set it 1927, in an England which is based on Chicago of that era. The similarities struck me: violence has created an age where murder is illegal but also gives control over the law. A murder which gives you power is therefore, in a philosophical sense, legal. Under those circumstances, everything is valid, limited only by your own personal moral code. Richard tests those boundaries by having a code set by Machiavelli: do everything you can to retain power, and you can do nothing wrong, because you control right and wrong.

Richard would have loved Emilia from Othello: "Why the wrong is but a wrong i' the world: and having the world for your labour, tis a wrong in your own world, and you might quickly make it right." And perhaps she might have fallen for him; there is much similarity between Richard and her husband Iago.

The other distinctive choice in this production of Richard III is by placing Richard in a wheelchair. Richard is usually portrayed with a hunch back and heavy limp, which serves to make him more fearsome, like the stereotypical Igor in Frankenstein. Of late, Richard's deformities have been downplayed in productions of this play. I wanted Richard to be able to use his deformities to his advantage. In a wheelchair he seems less fearsome rather than more, and easier to overlook. He has many bodies, healthy ones, to do his work for him.

He his even more helpless than the children he has murdered, or so he appears. They may be too young to fight, but they can run. Perhaps just the ability to run would have spared Richard and England a lifetime of pain.

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