Richard III
Stark Raving Theater at Theater! Theatre!
3430 SE Belmont St., 232-7072
7:30 pm Thursdays-Saturdays, 4 pm Sundays
Opens April 14 $13.50-$15
Ben Franklin:
Unplugged
Portland Institute for Contemporary Art at the Hollywood
Theater
4036 NE Sandy Blvd., 242-1419
8 pm Friday-Saturday, April 14-15
$13-$16
Richard III
is
Stark Raving's second go at Shakespeare; the company produced
Titus Andronicus in 1990.
Stark Raving
plans to produced Tourneur's The Revenger's Tragedy next
season.
Joining Demke on stage will be Stark Raving company members
Steve Boss, Jim Davis and Phil Navallo. Former Tygres Heart
regulars Eric Newsome, Brian Russell and Casy Brown are
also in the cast, as well as Deirdre Atkinson, Trish Egan
and Megan Harris.
Author Harry
Turtledove has explored fantastic alternate histories of
the Civil War and World War II in books like Alternate
Generals and Darkness Descending.
History always belongs to the victors, and the tales they
tell are like talismanic devices, warding off the troubling
"ifs" of an alternative ending. What if Hitler had invaded
England? What if Napoleon had won at Waterloo? What if Richard
III had survived Bosworth Field?
Richard III makes a convenient spook in the fancy-dress
wardrobe of English history, a demonic, blood-drenched murderer,
misshapen both in mind and body. What if the Tudors and
Lancasters had lost the Wars of the Roses? Who knows what
crimes would've been committed by this hunchbacked toad,
this bottled spider?
That's the Tudor story anyway--ideal for scaring children
before bedtime, but otherwise suspect. Still, in their attempt
to legitimize their rise to the throne, the Tudors inspired
some wondrous tales of the satanic head of the York tribe.
Shakespeare's Richard III is one of the great cruel clowns
of the theater. In fact, there's so much wit and evil glee
invested in Richard that Shakespeare could dispense with
the fools, drunks and rubes who usually inhabit the fringes
of his drama. Richard is a monster, but unlike other accounts
(the most fanciful claiming that he lay in his mother's
womb for two years before shoving out with a full set of
teeth and hair) Shakespeare suggests that Richard was manufactured.
"He is a creature of chaos, but he was born and bred to
be bloody," says Doug Miller, director of Stark Raving Theater's
new production of Richard III. "Killing is what he
did well."
Miller's production will stress the process by which Richard
became an engine of destruction. "He was doing what everyone
else at that time was doing," says Miller. "Everybody was
steeped in blood."
The idea is that once activated for war, Richard could
not easily switch to the tempers of peacetime, something
he's quite aware of in the play. So what's a killing machine
to do?
Miller and Stark Raving's artistic director, Dave Demke,
have discovered some sympathy for Richard. Yes, he remains
the quirt-tongued dissembler, but can he not have ulterior
motives for fomenting unrest? Could he, perhaps, be struggling
toward the creation of a new, albeit costly, peace? "War
is hell," a disgusted Sherman said after making Georgia
an inferno. Perhaps this same dichotomy exists in Richard.
In addition to drawing out often-unseen subtleties in Richard,
Demke's chosen to emphasize women's roles, something modern
productions of the piece usually trim away. "There's a constant
presence of grief in this play," says Demke--an element
often tragically downplayed by directors.
In many ways, the Wars of the Roses resemble our own Civil
War in the degree of horror and in the grim spectacle of
brothers killing brothers. Miller and Demke, who will play
Richard, have decided to set the action in 1860s America,
with the triumphant Northern House of York in blue, and
the vanquished Lancasters in gray. There may be some confusion
at the end, when the gray-clad forces opposed to Richard
are victorious (happily led by a man named Richmond). But,
what if...?
When poor Richard III passed a looking glass, he always
met animal associations: hedgehog, hellhound, rooting hog.
When famed San Francisco monologist Josh Korn-bluth crossed
a mirror's path one day, he was struck by how much he looked
like Benjamin Franklin. Just to verify his discovery, he
went to a Wells Fargo bank and asked a teller for her opinion.
After scrutinizing a $100 bill, it was decided that Kornbluth
was indeed a ringer for the founding father.
Kornbluth was inspired to take the stage as a monologist
after seeing one of Spalding Gray's pieces. He quickly gained
a name for himself as a hilarious ransacker of his own life
with pieces like Josh Kornbluth's Daily World (about
being raised by communist parents), Haiku Tunnel (the
vagaries of a temp life) and Moisture Seekers (ah,
sex).
In exploring the life of Franklin, Kornbluth discovered
the famous autobiography, which is itself a type of monologue.
Franklin's relationship with his son also led Kornbluth
into analyzing his relationship with his own revolutionary
father. The result is Ben Franklin: Unplugged, a
frank and funny monologue.
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Willamette Week | originally
published April 12,
2000
|
