New York Classical Theatre's Richard III

I am more and more coming to believe that the New York Classical Theatre company is one of the real gems of this city. We saw an earlier production of theirs--Hamlet, at the World Financial Center--and it has still stuck with me, particularly the way that they transformed the mall-like confines of the WFC into a castle in Denmark.

The last play we saw of theirs was Richard III, a sprawling complicated work about the bloodlines of the British royals. The play is a long one, and the NYCT confidently pared it down so that we were out of there just after dusk.

There is something supremely democratic about these productions. The audience is not full of nodding graybeards, or "theater people" but New Yorkers of all kinds who munch on food and bring their dogs, and the shows gather more people as they go on.

I think my favorite part about them however is they insert their lines into the text in order to move the audience from place to place around (in this case) Central Park or use directions found in the play and highlight those to give us our cue. In Hamlet, for example, when Claudius ask Hamlet where Polonius is, he calmly responds, "In the lobby," and on cue, we are all rose to our feet and hustled down there where the next scene was awaiting us.

These lines happened throughout Richard III. "Sit down," one character says, and then, emphatically, when the crowd seems unwilling to follow, he repeats, "SIT DOWN!!"

"Make way for the king," another goes, as the king comes up from behind the audience, and we all scooched to make a path for him.

One final note: Sean Haggerty played Richard in this performance, and played him marvelously, in all of his sweaty, twitchy, conniving glory.

More on Those Potted Plants

I must confess: I am a sucker for site-specific art and performance. Put me in front of a song-and-dance show, and after a while, I check my watch. Put that song-and-dance show in front of abandoned warehouse or empty field or out on the boulevards somewhere, and,well, sold.

That said, I was a little dubious about this one. The World Financial Center, at least in my mind, is so, blegh. Maybe its the proximity to the equally blegh Battery Park City, or the PF Chang's (or whatever) and their ilk that occupy by the ground floor, but the place always just seemed like exhibit A in the mallification of Manhattan.

Hamlet here however really made me look at the building in a new way. Not just the light coming in off the harbor and lighting up the food court, but the way the actors framed different parts of the structure. The building still looks cheaply made, but, behind Hamlet, it looks cheaply made in the way that a stage set looks cheaply made. With its columns and marble floors, the royals of Denmark made the WFC seem almost regal.

Watching Hamlet through a potted plant

The irony was not lost on me that the first free production of Shakespeare we’ve seen was staged in various spaces of the World Financial Center. This democratic and innovative approach meant that New York Classical Theatre’s Hamlet drew an audience of over 150 people, all of whom parked their tushes on various spots of the WFC’s well-polished floors, willingly heaving themselves up when directed to follow the actors to the next impromptu stage.

It was good that the play is so well known since the audience certainly provided its own distracting sideshow. Audience members shuffled along with Starbucks’ lattes or kids in tow, and one of my temporary neighbors brought sunflower seeds in a plastic bag which he shelled, rustled, and chewed throughout Hamlet’s encounter with his father’s ghost. Such intimacies forged a strong sense of community, asserting theater's animate and pertinent spirit, in a way that the internet never can.

Yet more meaningfully, the site of the performance blurred the lines between the theatrical world and the world we all inhabit. Which of course means including the unpleasant truths of The Gap and American Express. But such an approach also encompassed the gorgeous red sunlight that poured down equally on audience and actors alike, transforming all into glowing refractions in some larger play of mystery. The world and the play with its ghosts just down the street at the site of the World Trade Center, gave the seemingly random choice of location a surprising profundity which touched the realm of feeling more than that of thought. (Fortinbras echoes this when he bemoans: O proud Death,/ What feast is toward in thine eternal cell/ That thou so many princes at a shot/ So bloodily hast struck?“) As the play’s content tended towards death, so did the world around us darken. But when Hamlet (the masterful Justin Blanchard) delivered his peroration upon death, visitors in the WFC ascended on escalators out of sight to some celestial afterlife where, as Queen Gertrude (powerfully acted by Rita Rehn) says of Hamlet, we all “with the incorporal air do hold discourse.”