As the worm turns . . .
(HENRY VI PART III & RICHARD III)
Non-Union production - closed
by Louis Lopardi - 10/2003
Except for a brief lapse before the play proper began, this was exceptional theatre. Questionable scholarship,- but great theatre.
As Queen Margaret, Deborah Wallace gave us a truly 'Mad Meg' - believably fierce, determined, (and a little bit nuts). She controls the stage constantly (even when a prisoner herself) and is an acting force to be reckoned with. Carl Dowling was a convincing Duke of York, never making more of the man than was there, and living the role every second. The scene of his capture and death, one of the best of the evening, pitted these two in wonderful apposition. Meg's "Where are your mess of sons to back ye now" was a brilliant and carefully controlled display of venom. Her diction sometimes gave us pause; ("Alas poor York" sounding "Alas poor Yoric" - doubtless the result of my hearing so much Shakespeare in one week).
Seth Duerr, perfect in any of the roles he played this season, excelled as Richard of York. One saw, viscerally, the change and growth in him, his evolution in the early play seeming more a thing of natural selection than scheming. As Margaret reminds us, "The smallest worm will turn being trodden on..." Lines delivered even from a strained posture rang with conviction ("...shall we on the helmets of our foes Tell our devotion with revengeful arms"), and the great speeches of the latter play and of Richard III were unforced yet powerful. There is a potent intellect at work always - as in his aside from the 2nd half speech to Clarence, "we are not safe."
The ever versatile Thomas Westphal was here in no less than five roles, including a strange take on King Lewis of France. Stephen Cone also took multiple roles, among them the young Prince Edward, whose body language became increasingly as important as his diction. The cell scene gave us the best all evening from Jeremy Brena's Clarence.
As director, Mr. Duerr assembled and trained a mostly fine cast, and helped us, for instance, make sense of their scrambles, not just for the crown, but for the right to be king. There was the smoothest of transitions from the 'wooing of Lady Grey' to Richard's famous "dream on sovereignty" soliloquy. The entire evening was under fairly tight artistic control. Music, provided by a live drum, was well planned, and well done (but sometimes too loud for the space since it came from the rear, thus canceling-out actors' lines coming from the front).
Excellent lighting as always by Dana Sterling, and perhaps more subtlety in this than the other two plays. To my eyes the lights pulled down a bit to suitably focus us on Meg's rave of grief, building to Ms. Wallace's cry like a wounded animal of "Richard, where art thou?"- This was tragedy as Anouilh defined it for us: clean, and inevitable - wherein we observers are free to learn, and hopefully, grow.
Mr. Duerr has, consciously or not, a penchant for evoking scenes from the art of classical antiquity and presenting a simulacrum of them in his stage pictures. We saw for instance the famous statue of "The Dying Gaul" when Warwick (Ben Pologe), half reclining on the stage in his death scene, proved that with proper breath support a good actor can project from nearly any position. We saw the young "Saint Sebastian" of much Renaissance art, his body pierced with arrows, contracting and foreshortening - with all the pathos such contraposto engenders in us - but here lying on his side as the murdered Prince Edward. These things work on us - at some level - whether we will or not. And in the end, we exult inwardly, recognizing our roots in the classical past.