Confession time: I think themed Shakespeare is tacky. I can’t help it, I do.
One of the focuses of my acting courses in New York City was Shakespeare as taught by Angela Vitale and Jimmy Tripp (may he rest in peace); two preeminent voices from the now-defunct National Shakespeare Conservatory. If that sounds intense, it was. If it doesn’t sound intense, it was.
Shakespeare became this magical, ethereal, foundational thing in my life, but it was also rigid and unmoving. Intimidating.
My anxiety interacts with rules and guidelines in a way that means that, when I experience something new, particularly something that I’m not skilled at or have little experience with, rules and guidelines tend to freeze me up.
Shakespeare was no exception. Suddenly the years of experience and craft that I’ve been honing since I was in single digits meant nothing. That shook me. It shook me so badly that it threatened to crumble the foundations of my life in a permanent fashion. I wasn’t the only one, and I’m sorry to say that not everyone survived.
So. When I say it was intense, I mean it.
I’ve worked through a lot of that intensity and trauma in the intervening decade-plus since my time in acting school, but there are still some lingering gremlins from that period. I’ve already written one out: Themed Shakespeare Is Tacky. The other is: Shakespeare Should Not Be Cut.
With all that said, welcome to my Candy Land-themed, extensively cut production of Shakespeare’s Richard III.
The cuts come from necessity. This is a four-and-a-half hour long play with upwards of thirty-five characters. You don’t want to see that. I don’t want to direct that. I literally could not have cast that. So you’re going to see fifteen people playing eighteen-ish characters over the course of a couple hours instead.
That rule was easy to break. Necessity sometimes requires bad behavior.
But where did Candy Land come from? It was a joke. I knew Twelfth Night was taken in this year’s Shakespeare Series, but who in their right mind was going to take on Richard? Beyond that, how in the world was a person supposed to make such a grey and grim text palatable for a Grand Valley audience? I asked myself those questions in the background, while in the foreground I noodled over the worst concept I could think of.
I don’t remember the other concepts. This was a year ago and they were truly awful. What I know is that the power of juxtaposition took over. If this show is grey, make it colorful. If this show is grim, make it campy. Dimension 20 (Dropout.tv’s Dungeons & Dragons streaming show. Seek it out, it’s great TV.) already proved that a Game of Thrones-style show set in a candy and food world worked. Game of Thrones is just a fantasy take on the Wars of the Roses. Richard III is a dramatization of the final days of the Wars of the Roses.
