Back in The Before Times (2019), I directed Richard III at Pigeon Creek Shakespeare—one of my favorite, and most personal, productions of all time. It also was the one that got the most attention from people who give out awards for that sort of thing. I had such a fantastic cast, I learned so much, and I loved the whole experience (hilariously, because I started out feeling like, This is not the play for me. What do I even have to say to this play? and somehow, I’m still yapping about it years later. A surprise!
Pigeon Creek has a beautiful partnership with Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp and WBLV, where a couple times per year, PCSC performs in Blue Lake’s Elizabethan style playhouse as a fundraiser for WBLV. They usually remount a play from a prior season. I’ve been lucky enough to have had four of the seven plays I have directed for them remounted for the Rose (Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, Antony and Cleopatra, and Richard III).
Richard was supposed to have its Rose show in 2023, but a COVID outbreak among the cast canceled it. It took another two years, but we finally got it back on its feet! This might have been the hardest remount I’ve been part of. There are just so many lines. It’s a long play. Plus intimacy, fights, music, weird props, blood effects. It was a lot, but it all came together. This group of actors, especially their core company members, are just astoundingly adept. I wrote, “I gave an emailed note on Monday morning about diagonals, corners, power positions, etc. It was complex and also general (applied to every scene). All of the actors took it and used it beautifully. I thought I would have to do a physical demonstration of its application in at least a scene or two, but they all got it. They know their craft and how things work.”
Coming back to a show six years after we first created it gives me the distance to see my own work. This production is very good. I had moments, watching it in performance, when I appreciated the director’s craft, momentarily forgetting it was mine. I’m proud of this play in a way that I couldn’t let myself be when I was closer to the creation of it.
The magic of the Rose, and other Elizabethan-style spaces, is that putting Shakespeare’s words into an architecture that at least tries to match what he was writing for lets the text bloom and rediscover itself in new ways. In this production, there were times when we had kings up on the balcony—they were distancing themselves from the peasants in the yard and lower part of the audience, but connecting with the people at the second audience level as equals. When Tyrell reports on the horrific murder of the princes, he’s in the yard, forcing everyone to look down on him as he’s as low as a person can be. And there’s something just poetic about actors tossing a severed head over the heads of the audience.
The Rose also affords interesting opportunities for people to be present with the audience and not with others onstage, to eavesdrop, to avoid, to conspire.
I love Michigan, these actors, this play.
Oh, and then after the Rose, it also did a tiny little Michigan tour, playing the Container Globe in Detroit and I think the Sauk in Jonesville.
Cast List:
- Scott Lange: Richard III
- Ashley Normand: Brakenbury; Duchess of York; Mayor; Richmond
- Chaz Albright: Clarence’s Boy; Hastings; Sheriff
- Kat Hermes: Bishop of Ely; Clarence; Grey/Rivers; Herbert; Prince Edward; Princess Elizabeth of York
- Kate Bode: Queen Margaret; Sir John; Vaughan
- Katherine Mayberry: Oxford; Queen Elizabeth
- Kimi Griggs: Dorset; Lady Anne; Lovell; First Murderer
- Kristopher Arnold: Archbishop; Catesby; Edward IV; Tyrrel
- Riley Van Ess: Blunt; Buckingham
- Scott Wright: Cardinal; Henry VI; Second Murderer; Stanley
- Seraphina Zorn: Clarence’s Daughter; Keeper in the Tower; Ratcliffe; Richard, Duke of York
Show photography (all by me)
