Ryan M. Sero

Ryan M. Sero is a professional actor and writer. Past roles include Herbert Milk (A Modicum of Freedom), The Raccoon (Inbetween Places), Sancho Panza (Don Quixote), Mephistophiles (Doctor Faustus), Romeo (Romeo & Juliet: An Escapist Comedy), and Don John/ Don Pedro (Much Ado About Nothing).

Plays he has written include A Modicum of Freedom, Romeo & Juliet: An Escapist Comedy, The Cheese, Miracles Don’t Come Cheap, and the upcomingFor ‘Daws to Peck At – which will be part of the Pearl Company’s StaycationFestival in August.

He frequently works with Decoder Ring Theatre (an online audio drama group), Artword Theatre, and The Mysterious Players (improv murder mysteries).

He is the artistic director of Make Art Theatre.

Richard III

At the end of the War of the Roses, Richard feels miserable. He wants nothing more than the crown won by his brother, Edward IV. He sets out to take the crown by force and cunning, fueled by his envy and pride. He weaves a spider’s web of lies, turning allies into enemies, and threatening to topple the entire kingdom as soon as he gains it…

Richard III is William Shakespeare’s most lovably evil villain, as renowned for his charm as for his horrific acts. His scheming politician archetype is seen to this day in dramas such as House of Cards and Game of Thrones, and, far too often, in real life as well.

Richard III plays until March 24 at the Staircase Theatre.
The Staircase Theatre 27 Dundurn Street North Hamilton.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/make.art.theatre
https://makearttheatre.weebly.com

Transcript

Welcome to episode 118 of Stageworthy. I’m your host, Phil Rickaby. Stageworthy is a podcast about people in Canadian theatre featuring conversations with actors, directors, playwrights, and more.

You know, if you haven’t subscribed to the podcast, I would like to remind you that subscribing is the best way to make sure that you never miss an episode of Stageworthy. And there are some great episodes coming up, so trust me when I tell you that you don’t want to miss them. So make sure that you subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Music, or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, to get every new episode of Stageworthy delivered right to your device.

If you want to drop me a line, you can find Stageworthy on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at stageworthypod, and you can find the website at stageworthypodcast.com. And if you want to drop me a line, you can find me on Instagram and Twitter at philrickaby, and my website is philrickaby.com. My guest is Ryan Sero from Make Art Theatre, which is presenting Richard III until March 24th at the Staircase Theatre in Hamilton. Exactly, and business people are very good at business, which means that they’re not going to do it for free. If you want a good businessman to help you run your thing, you can’t just say, hey, I’m going to profit share with you, or hey, you know, can you do this on spec? They’re gonna be like, no, I need $70,000 a year.

Sure, yeah, well, I mean, even a freelancer, you’re gonna come across somebody who’s like, you know, they’ll be like, I have to eat. Of course, yes, and of course they have to eat and stuff like that. And so in some cases, there’s probably some kind of a magic mystical being out there, like something out of Greek mythology, with the head of a marketer and the body of an artist and the heart of a musician and so forth, and who is interested in growing specifically your business, who is like, yeah, I will pro bono dedicate my time for a couple of years to help you boost your business until it’s successful, and then we’ll all reap the rewards.

But to find that guy, is anybody listening? Is anybody out there? You know, and you know, my email address is it is definitely that that kind of thing where you’re like, and you know, it’s in, in the Toronto art scene, it’s almost like getting the word out is hard, because people who are listening are also listening to various different channels. There is literally something happening all the time. Yeah, there’s Yeah, well, and you know, more and more, I’m noticing that actually in Hamilton, like I’m one of the things that I’m going I’m seriously looking at for for next year, because I’ve been doing I’ve done three full seasons of make art theatre.

And before those, I was doing kind of festival circuits and stuff. But since started since literally starting the full three seasons, we’re talking three years ago. Yeah, not even two and a half, two and three quarters years ago.

I was the only one in town basically doing classical theatre, there was a couple of other people. And all like, it was like a month after I started, like a ton of other people started. So I’m starting to rethink, like the classical component of make art theatre.

And and because when I started, when I the first Shakespeare show I did, which was much ado about nothing at the Hamilton fringe was the last year that Hamilton urban theatre did a show, they’re still sort of active in workshops and stuff like that, I think in classes for students, but last time they did a full show, to my knowledge. And, and so I was kind of at that point, almost like the only game in town. Well, then almost immediately after that, now there’s like Tottering Biped and 9m productions and Flint and Steel.

And like, there’s another one, I think somewhere. And so like, there’s like, now there’s like five people doing Shakespeare. And so there’s, you know, my my brain is kind of like, well, if that’s no longer a niche that I can access, then maybe I got to move something else.

What I mean, in terms of like, when you’re looking at like niches in, in Hamilton, is there a niche that is aside from the classical that isn’t being filled? Or is there? I think there’s a lot of niches that aren’t being filled. There’s one company they started last year. They did Venus in Fur, Rooks Theatre.

And it was a marvelous production. It was really, really good. And so they seem to be, they also did a series of sort of radio plays around Christmas.

So but they seem to be like live radio plays, kind of really cool. And, and anyway, so they seem to be kind of accessing sort of that, like with Venus in Fur, I mean, they’re kind of accessing that like, dark, interesting, kind of theatre, right? So like, they’re kind of going there. There’s another company in town.

And they do like political shows, the same boat theatre. So like, yeah, there’s a few niches, but there’s a lot of stuff that people haven’t quite accessed and stuff like that. Now, the other weird thing about Hamilton is, I’m not sure how many of those niches and only by exploring that you find out, but I’m not sure how many of those niches kind of exist.

Sure. Because it’s kind of a weird town where there’s like a ton of artists, but there’s a ton of like steelworkers. And there’s a ton of, you know, it’s very, it’s a very, very, very blue collar town in a lot of ways.

And so like some of the artier stuff, like performance art, I don’t think would fly here. Well, it’s hard to know. Of course, yeah.

Until you go in there. And then you find, oh, there’s a ton of people here who maybe won’t say. And you never really know what that I mean, one of the interesting things every time, every time I’m in Hamilton, I’m struck by the two Hamiltons.

The art is the new steel and the more hipster Hamilton and the steel town. Yeah. And I think a lot of times they’re in conflict.

There was recently a bunch of idiots went down lock street and threw bricks through windows or stones and stuff like that. Notably carrying banners about that said, we are the ungovernable, which I thought was especially ironic because they were all wearing masks. And if you’re really ungovernable, you don’t need a mask.

From my understanding of that, they were purportedly protesting gentrification. Exactly. Right.

So hacking small, like these small businesses that were, you know, some of them had been struggling. It’s not really fighting the man. Like the little guy.

Well, this might come as a shock to some people, but it turns out that these angry rock throwing anarchist bums actually did not really think their plan through. Really? Really? Yeah, really. People who were just throwing rocks at things, they weren’t actually considering they didn’t have a plan.

Yeah. No, absolutely. Yeah.

It’s very odd. Yeah. Napoleon wasn’t leading this.

Yeah. And I mean, the response has been really great. I think like I think that those businesses have had a lot of community, good community response and stuff like that.

So that’s really great to know. But that is what that is kind of what you’re talking about. The two Hamiltons have a conflict there.

One half is the is the lock street hipsters, you know, with their businesses and their chic, whatever they’re doing. Yeah. And then the other half are angry that these businesses exist, that they’re taking over what was our blue collar mecca.

Right. The question is, the interesting question is, were those people who were throwing rocks, were those the blue collar mecca? Oh, who knows? Who knows? We don’t know because they’re wearing masks. Well, yes.

I mean, I mean, I don’t I can only speculate. My my brain takes me to a place of where I can kind of try to deduce what it was going on. My guess is basically it’s probably a bunch of people who are down on their luck and really unhappy that they were down on their luck personally.

Not I’m not talking about, you know, socio politically or anything, but just that they were particularly down on their luck and were angry and felt like they didn’t have any other recourse and thought, I’m angry and I’m mad. I’m going to blame you and I’m going to throw a rock because I don’t have anything else to do. It’s the same reason why some why a lot of people wind up stealing things.

It’s because it’s like, I can’t get a job. I don’t know where to get money. I’m just going to go hold up a 7-Eleven, you know, and and not that that’s right or that that makes them, you know, but you try to you try to understand that they’re angry and that they’re desperate and that they’re in a place they feel like they’ve been forced there into a corner.

Yeah. And it’s really sad that that happens and you have to stop it. You have to to fight back against it.

But I try to understand the people I don’t like. Yeah. I mean, you can I mean, that’s you do have that.

You can either do that or just be like, fuck those guys and like write them off. Of course, you continue to build a rift between whoever they are. Yeah, that’s our echo chamber.

Exactly. And that’s one of the biggest problems that we have these days. I mean, no, I shouldn’t say that.

That’s one of the biggest problems humanity has always had. And it has become very sharply defined in an era of the Internet. But I mean, we’ve always had it.

We’ve always insulated within tribes and all these other tribes around us are weirdos. We’re the good ones. Yeah, we’ve always done that.

Exactly. And we live in that echo chamber. You know what I heard? I heard this about them.

And I heard. And of course, we don’t do that. We are great.

They’re bad. We are great. They’re bad.

And you just keep doing that. And it’s only become, you know, sort of more more visible. You see it more in a digital age where people are writing it down and sharing it.

One of my favorite quotes is times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents and everyone is writing a book. And I don’t remember which senator, but it was a Roman senator.

And so I think that in some ways, Bob Dylan was right. But I’m not sure that the times have changed all that much. Well, it’s that all the more things change where they stay the same.

Exactly. Which is kind of why I like Shakespeare. Yes.

Yeah. I mean, the fascinating thing about Shakespeare is this guy who was writing plays in the 1500s. Yeah.

Wrote characters that still resonate. Of course. Yeah.

And deeply, deeply resonate. And and I read a quote recently. Some it was in a maximum security men’s prison down in the States, I believe.

And they were doing a production of Julius Caesar, like in the prison. And a reporter asked one of these guys, like, what? Like, you’re you know, you’re I mean, it wasn’t death row, but it’s like one below that. Right.

You’re a supermax. You’re never getting out. There’s razor wire everywhere.

Like it’s like you’re in here forever. Why bother putting on Shakespeare? What is it about Shakespeare that you guys need to talk about? And the guy said, well, as long as people love and hate and have ambition and are jealous and envious and all these things, there will always be Shakespeare. Yeah.

And I was like, yes, yes, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And it’s just and everything like I said, I did Julius Caesar last year in November and throughout that process and throughout the process of doing Richard III as well.

We were constantly being like, this is exactly what’s going on right now. Like everything is exactly the same. Yeah.

I mean, one of Richard’s big things in that play is that he feels like one of the guys who wants to be ungovernable. Right. Like he’s he feels like people just make fun of him and they don’t like him and he feels ostracized and he feels like he can’t do anything.

That’s the opening speech. He says, I in this weak, piping time of peace have no delight to pass away the time unless to spy my shadow in the sun and discount or make fun of my own deformity. Yeah.

And therefore and then he goes on to say, because I can’t do that, I’m going to take revenge on everybody who won’t let me party with them, who won’t let me have fun with them, who don’t like me. I’m going to go throw rocks. Yeah.

And so five hundred years ago, four hundred years ago, whatever, you know, it’s exactly the same situation. Human nature hasn’t really changed all that much. Yeah.

This thing with Richard is not just like he doesn’t want to just throw rocks. He’s in essence like tearing everything down. Oh, yeah.

Not like a guy without power in the streets. He’s a guy who he’s far more effectual. Yes.

He’s making stuff happen, which is another thing that I adore about Shakespeare. I remember watching a few years ago on Netflix for the first time, the West Wing. I watched the West Wing all the way through.

And one of the things I kept thinking about was like, man, these writers are not afraid to make stuff happen. You know, they will assassinate world leaders and they will you know, they will do things in this show. And so often I see theater where people, writers are afraid to do things.

Yeah. What they want to do for some weird reason is have people standing around the kitchen being like, the corn is coming as well today. Well, I mean, like somebody just like, you know, not that that play can’t be about big things and that play.

And I’ve loved that play. I’ve seen that play and I’ve loved that play. But, you know, but but there is nobody writing, you know, war and war.

I shouldn’t say nobody, but it’s so very rare to find somebody who’s writing, you know, kings trying to overthrow kings and and writing life and death and all these big things like right to the hilt and pushing their characters far enough. Yeah. No, I mean, and the I mean, Shakespeare lived in a time when the people that we all looked up to, that were looked up to, were nobles, were kings, were queens.

Yes. People who, by their nature, can make things happen. Yeah.

And in our day, the people that we see around us, the people that we that we look up to. Yeah. Maybe you’re not those people.

Yeah. I mean, sometimes they are. Yeah.

But a lot of people, you know, who’s your who’s your hero? Well, that’s that’s democracy. Yeah, exactly. Well, yes, that’s the rise of democracy is now now anybody can be in government.

Exactly. So it’s not we actually we haven’t changed in some ways. We haven’t changed who we respect.

We’ve just changed who can be those people. So we still respect people with power and authority and money. Yeah.

It’s just now anybody can have them or ostensibly anybody can have anybody who has the money to be able to run a campaign. Well, and, you know, anybody can kind of get that money. And yes, it is really, really, really, really, really, really difficult for some people to get that money.

But yes, but theoretically, you could come from, you know, the the the worst slums on the planet. And you could come over to the wealthiest nation in the world. And I’m not sure where the worst slums are.

And I’m not sure where the wealthiest nation is. So I’m not trying to make this about geopolitics. But but you could come from from there and go to there.

And then theoretically, you could claw your way up to pretty much the top. Sure. Okay.

If you’re an immigrant, you can’t be president of the United States, but you can be a judge and you can be a senator. You can be in government there. And and so, you know, we do live in a world where those boundaries are not non-existent, but they’re a lot thinner than they were in Shakespeare’s when you needed blue blood to be born into.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Even if very, very peripherally, oh, dear, we’ve spent so much time doing civil wars and War of the Roses that we have no idea where to go.

We’ve got to go to Germany to get the next British king, which is what they had to do in the 1700s. I’m trying to remember exactly what facilitated it, but they had to go get they went over that. That was the I want to say the Hanover’s, but I could be wrong about that.

That’s King George the first. And he sort of stays out of politics because he doesn’t speak English. So he’s just England’s king.

And then George the second, he speaks English, but he’s kind of like, I’m just going to do what dad didn’t stay out of politics. Now, George the second’s wife never liked that. She wasn’t a big fan of him staying out of politics.

And and she wanted she thought that their dynasty should be exercising more control. She encouraged her son to exercise more control, particularly over the upstart colonies. Yes.

And King George the third takes mom’s advice and taxes the daylights out of America. And they’re like, and that starts to kind of somebody was taking that much interest in politics in the world. They yeah, things go apart.

I always find those things interesting, those little seeds that become I will not remember the sequence of events, but basic cracked ran an article years ago about how a sandwich started World War One. And it’s because they they were trying to assassinate Ferdinand. Yes.

And they miss and they hit his driver or one of his bodyguards. And Ferdinand is apparently compassionate for this fellow. And he’s driving around looking for a hospital and they’re getting lost and they don’t know where they’re going.

And the assassins, meanwhile, have have regrouped at a at a cafe to mourn the fact that they missed Ferdinand and who should drive by. But Archduke Ferdinand, and they get a second shot and they shoot him and they kill him because they stopped for a sandwich. And that starts a chain of events that wind up with World War One.

Sure. And you and World War One starts a chain of events that winds up with World War Two that winds up with the Cold War that wants, you know, this I always find like just those little seeds that start to become trees. I mean, that’s I mean, and that the interesting thing about those seeds is is if you were to look at Shakespeare’s Wars of the Roses cycle.

Yeah. That ends with Richard III. Yeah.

Which resolves the whole thing. Yeah. There are so many seeds that are planted early on.

Oh, yeah. Well, and a lot of people I didn’t do this when when cutting Richard down figuratively. I mean, the play, not the man.

Yeah, of course. But when when doing our edit, you know, a lot of people splice in a bit of Henry VI, where there’s a speech of Richard’s in there that a lot of people splice into the opening monologue of Richard’s. Olivier did it in his film version, for instance.

And and I didn’t. But people do take those earlier bits and kind of mix them in. What’s interesting is there was a company many, many years ago.

They did this. You can watch it. I remember on TV.

They did the entire history cycle, like all like all of that’s like all of the histories or specific. Oh, no, they all of the history plays. Did they start with Caesar? They started with like the English.

I guess you’d have to start with Troilus and Cressida. I think that was I think that one doesn’t count. No, I know it doesn’t count.

I’m just saying I’m just saying that that is the earliest one. The ones that were the all the English history did this whole cycle. Yeah.

With a company of actors. Yeah. And some of the actors would play like a character in a particular family like the whole way through.

Yeah. And that’s amazing to watch. But when it got to the Wars of the Roses stuff, because, you know, we all knew we all know Richard III.

Yeah. But do we know the Henry’s? Do we know like do we know all the things that came before it? Yeah. No, I barely know him.

And I’ve read I don’t think I’ve read all of the Henry VI ones. I read Henry IV, both parts one and two. And I saw the Keanu Reeves River Phoenix film, my own private Idaho.

And half of it is like this, you know, dark realist movie about these street hustlers. And the other half is like Henry IV. But there’s still there’s still the street hustlers.

It’s like it’s super weird. It’s a super weird movie. It’s kind of worth watching in a lot of ways.

But like, it’s so weird. Yeah. But I mean, you find in those early like in the Henry VI, you find like all of the early like some of the some like Richard III stuff.

Yeah. He says pretty early on what he plans to do. Yeah.

In Richard III. Yeah. It’s almost like that speech at the beginning of Richard III is kind of a recap.

Yeah. Which it might have been. I mean, I actually have not looked this up for some time, you know, back in school.

Of course, I learned it. But, you know, I haven’t looked it up for some time, which order they were written as well, because it very well might have been a recap, you know, last week on Richard, right? Like, I can’t remember. You’re right.

I can’t remember if they were written like Richard III and then go back. Because he didn’t do them in order. I do know that he did not do them in order.

It may well have been like Richard III. And then and then you’re like, you know, Richard guy, we’re really interested in him. Yeah.

Well, that’s what happened with Falstaff. That’s what happened with Falstaff, right? Because people were like, Falstaff’s great. So I’ve heard.

I’ve never actually read The Merry Wives of Windsor. I don’t recommend it. I’ll probably read it eventually.

It’s like one of those, it feels like the sequel that didn’t need to be made. You know, like the second two Pirates movies. Yeah.

It’s like in that movie, they finally make that movie. You’re like, oh, I really missed that. Oh, that’s what they chose well.

That’s why specifically I bring up the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, because they were like, boy, Johnny, Jack Sparrow, he’s a really great character. Let’s make him the main character. No, he’s the comic relief.

He is the comic relief. Yeah. And he doesn’t work.

Yeah. And so Falstaff probably the same. Yeah, very much so.

I mean, the thing is, like, whereas Windsor is completely unrelated to anything we’ve seen before. Yeah. Falstaff.

He’s just he’s just Falstaff. Yeah. I wonder what audiences at the time like did audiences flock to love Falstaff anyway, whether it was there just like a couple of elites sitting at the back being like, oh, this is ridiculous.

I mean, honestly, I think like he wrote it because he, you know, he had the pressure because of the, you know, Falstaff dies in Henry V part two, fourth, and then fourth. And he’s not around. No, he’s not around.

And it’s like, oh, OK, so we liked that guy. Yeah. OK, so we would like to see Charlotte or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Yeah. Resurrect. Yeah.

Well, he killed him. So I’ve heard he killed him in the first place because he was sick of him. Yeah.

He just didn’t want to write him anymore. He was like the Sherlock Holmes guy. He was like, I have other things.

I wrote The Lost World, people. Which which interestingly, you know, it’s it’s maybe it’s a curse involving Holmes himself because Basil Rathbone was typecast as villains his for his movie career. And then he got the opportunity to play Sherlock Holmes, a hero character.

He’s like terrific. And so he takes that role and then he got typecast as Sherlock Holmes. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, that’s the thing that can happen. I mean, people are afraid of typecasting.

I’m not totally sure why, to some extent. But this is speaking as a guy who is struggling to sell plays in Hamilton, you know. So to me, being typecast and then working the 20 years playing the same type of character sounds awesome.

Right. Like, you know, just that sounds great. Learn to like embrace that and just be like, yes, this is what I do.

Well, and, you know, and I understand why if I was if I thought I was being typecast, I certainly would try to break it to some extent. But yes, I would also kind of try to embrace it. And some guys do break it.

Heath Ledger broke it. He was he found himself being typecast as the pretty boy hero and he did not want to do that. And so he started taking he took on I think the first one was actually Brothers Grimm, the Terry Gilliam film where he played sort of this like jittery, twitchy dude.

Sure. But that’s the film was never finished, right? No, no, no, no, no. It was The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, which is a far superior film to Brothers Grimm.

And, you know, it was like he never like he didn’t finish them, you know. But I one of the reasons not I mean, there’s a lot of reasons, I think, to really like that movie. But one of the reasons that I think it’s really great is that they somehow managed to work it where if I’m not sure what they would have done if he hadn’t have done it, you know, like you watch the movie and you go, it’s so seamless, not just in terms of the effects and they got to play the replacement him as he goes through.

But even just the way that the plot is structured, you’re like, of course, that’s where it had to go. That’s what has to happen. It had to be new actors playing him in those final scenes.

And so it was just I just thought it was it was fantastic the way that they did that, because it doesn’t feel like it was unfinished. It doesn’t feel like they had to do a rewrite or a recast. It just feels like a great movie.

Anyway, so he managed to break it with Brothers Grimm. And then I think the big one was Brokeback Mountain, which, although technically still a romantic lead, it was not the kind of romantically he was used to playing. Exactly.

And so it broke the strength of that. And then he got to do Joker and then he was done. Yeah, which is really too bad.

It was. I remember being very shocked by it here reading the news. I stopped in at the school library at the time to check my email and end up on it.

I think I was on IMDB and and the headline page was Heath Ledger’s dead. And I did like a double take. I’m like, he’s like, is he like 30? You know, it’s like, what do you mean Heath Ledger’s dead? Right.

You know. And yeah, it was the same thing that I kind of the same reaction I had with Anton Yelchin. Yeah.

You know, when I knew Chekhov. And then my friend Tyler, who’s in Richard the Third with me, he said when we were talking about it, he pointed out that depressingly, that means that young Chekhov died before old Chekhov died. Oh, fuck.

Yeah, exactly. You know, you just kind of like, oh, come on. What is wrong with the universe? Yeah.

David Bowie’s dead. I thought he was immortal. I was I was I was counting on it.

I was actually a fairy king. Yes, he’s actually Jareth Goblin King. I mean, and was playing the role of David Bowie.

I would have bought be the perfect like that’s that would be the most David Bowie is thing. I saw a brilliant meme towards the end of that year, because that was the year of of the election. And, and many other Alan Rickman died as well.

And all this this disaster seemed to have been occurring the entire year. And this meme said, I’m not saying David Bowie was holding the universe together. But that is true.

Yes. In which case the Mayans wouldn’t have been off by that much. No, just their calculations.

Yeah, just five, six years, something like that. And I was just disappointed. It didn’t happen like in the movie 2012.

Yes. That that was 2012. To get back to Richard, I don’t mind the tangents.

I love tangents. At what point did you decide to do Richard III? And was there something in particular that made you decide that Richard was what you needed to do now? Well, I wanted to program a couple of classical shows. And so I was sort of rooting around for which ones.

Caesar had slotted in kind of naturally because of the when I programmed it, all the politics of the world were looming around. And I was like, this is a great political play in a lot of ways. And it really is.

It’s a really, really great play. It really clips along to every now and then. As big a fan of as I am of Shakespeare, some of them kind of drag.

But I remember reading Julius Caesar and going, this really moves like there is there’s I’m trying to think I don’t believe there’s a B plot like most Shakespeare’s there’s like in King Lear, there’s King Lear and then there’s kind of like Edward or Edmund and you know, there’s a this B plot sort of running around. But with Julius Caesar, it’s just Brutus. It’s just him being Brutus and and killing Caesar anyways.

So I programmed that one and I thought it’d be good to kind of do another sort of a politically kind of one. So I’m sort of looking at those. I’ve always really, really loved the character of Richard.

Well, how can you know? Exactly. First off, just just right there. Yeah.

And I think ultimately, it to some extent, pure egomania. Yeah. Me just going, I really want to play Richard kind of pushed me over the edge before fully solidifying it.

I work with a group in town called the Actors Forge and I didn’t start it. It was started by I want to say Katie Allen and Stephanie Lawler and Victoria Adam. There’s a few people that sort of started it.

And basically, the idea is just a bunch of actors get together and we just kind of throw stuff around. We do, you know, warm ups and exercises and we do this technique or that technique or we show each other. I’m working on this monologue or let’s work on the scene together.

We kind of critique each other and it’s sort of like a nice, friendly but honest environment. Professionals and peers governing each other instead of like a master teacher student kind of dynamic. Anyway, so at that one of the things we did a Shakespeare unit, like we did a whole bunch of Shakespeare at one point.

And I brought in Richard III because the opening monologue is one of my favorite monologues. And so I’m working on that, finally solidified it where I’m like, I’m not dropping this. I’m just going to keep doing it.

This was a long time ago now, but when I was working on it. But and so I said, yes, I’m doing Richard III. OK.

And I want to play Richard III. I try to keep that sort of egomaniacal casting out of my work. Well, I mean, we all try, but occasionally it has to come out.

I mean, why else did we do this in the first place? Well, and I do respect people who are kind of honest about it, too, because there’s some stuff where I go, I’d like to play this role. And there’s some there’s plenty of those actually where I have recast them, where I have been like, I want to do this play and I want to play this part. And then I see people audition and I say, what parts are you interested in? And they tell me and sometimes they go, yeah, you would be better at that than me.

And I cast them instead. So it’s not a pure ego thing. But I do try to be honest and say that, you know, there are some parts that I kind of want to play them and I just I want to do it.

We all have that. And if you’re producing, you get to do that. Yeah.

And and I’m you know, I’m not saying I’m going to be the best Richard III in the world. I would guess probably Sir Ian McKellen, though I have yet to watch his film version. I’m quite fond of his film version.

I when I was researching and so like basically I will watch it probably sometime this week now that our version has opened and I can not be influenced by it because, you know, you don’t want to watch. I don’t mind watching other people’s performances and plays like halfway or three quarters of the way through a rehearsal process because by that point, I’m pretty solid in my direction and it won’t it won’t jar me around. I did use his I didn’t take his script, but I did read his script while I was cutting.

Particularly if I was cutting and cutting and cutting and cutting out of a monologue and eventually I’d go, boy, did I just really hack that to ribbons? I mean, did I destroy it? And I would go over to Ian McKellen’s version of Richard III, his script, and I would read it and I would see what he did. And if he cut it too, I’d go, oh, OK, then I’m safe. Because if McKellen cut it, then obviously it’s fine to cut it.

And the histories in particular are kind of brutal because there’s all these court machinations and all these peripheral side characters. I mean, there’s there’s like, I don’t know, there’s like 50, 60 characters in some of these plays because there’s all these courtiers and people and you’re going, I’m not sure who’s important. You know, and you can lose the forest for the trees when you read it over and over and over again trying to cut the thing and eventually like, OK, if I don’t need Rivers, Vaughn and Gray, I’m going to make them all one person.

You know, you can kind of do that, but you don’t want to. It’s a balancing act between making it digestible for an audience because we don’t know these guys anymore and making it and making it still be the same play. Because if you cut out all the court machinations and all of the courtiers and all the side characters, then you kind of sit there thinking to yourself, well, maybe I actually don’t want to do one of the history plays if I want to eliminate all of the stuff that makes them one of the history plays.

Maybe I don’t want to do one of them. Yeah. One of the one of the interesting things about the history plays, but Shakespeare in general, is that, and this makes it a bit of a challenge for the modern audience, is that most of the exposition happens up front.

Yeah. Before our ear as an audience gets attuned to the language. Yes.

Because usually we sit down and we’re like, even if we’re familiar with it, it takes us a little bit of time to go. Oh wait. Oh, now I understand it because we have to hear it for a bit before our brain clicks in and understands it.

And, and that’s why a lot of times when I’m doing Shakespeare or classical texts for the first few speeches or the first couple of scenes, I will lean less on the poetry. You know, I won’t flow into the iambic pentameter until scene three. Yeah.

Because, because that, because if I have a more, uh, modern delivery, then it lets, it lets modern audiences digest it faster. And you just talk a little slower. Richard III has, has the big advantage of that very, very long opening monologue.

Oh sure. And, and we’re familiar enough with that. Yes.

That I think most people. Yeah. We’ve, everybody’s at least heard now is the winter of our discontent.

They might’ve heard no other lines from that but they’ve at least heard that. And so as soon as they hear that, they go, Oh, it’s this one. And then they’re kind of tuned in a little bit.

And so, yeah. So it kind of works that way. Some of them are a lot harder than that because we don’t know the opening quite so well.

Yes. Um, and, uh, but even those sort of depend on, I mean, most people are familiar enough with, with the, the ones that get produced. I mean, nobody knows what’s going on in, time out of Athens or, or Pericles Shakespeare geeks do, but audiences don’t, but, but, but they’re not producing.

It does make them a hard sell. And that’s, I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s a vicious circle because we don’t produce them because people don’t know them. So they don’t go to see those.

Well, yeah. And, and, uh, yeah, basically we, you know, we know Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Julius Caesar, King Lear, a little bit. Midsummer night’s dream is probably the most, and maybe much you do about nothing.

Um, and that’s like, we’ll recognize titles from other ones, but like, I don’t think people are as are terribly familiar with them. And even in that list that I just rattled off, people aren’t really familiar with a lot of them. No, that’s true.

Um, they’re most familiar, I think probably with Romeo and Juliet, wouldn’t you say? I mean, I would agree with that. I mean, that’s the one that we, so everybody’s done that in school. Everybody, you know, read that.

And they should, it’s a brilliant play. I mean, like the other thing is, you know, people, some people are like, I’m sick of it. And it’s all, and you’re like, you know, you’re sick of it because it’s ubiquitous and it’s ubiquitous because it’s awesome.

Yeah. I’ve read that play a ton. I did a parody of it.

I’m going to remount the, uh, it’s called Romeo and Juliet and escapist comedy. And I’m remounting it at the Hamilton fringe this summer. Um, and, uh, anyway, so if you want to know a play, um, you read it.

If you want to know it well, you, you know, you study it in a class. If you want to know it inside and out, you perform the play. But if you want to know it backwards and forwards better than the author himself, you write a parody of it because in order to, in order to write a comedy version of it, you have to break it down to its molecules and then rebuild it as a different version of itself that is different than itself.

And to do that, you have to know it more intrinsically the DNA of it. And, and in so doing that, I developed such an appreciation for Romeo and Juliet that you wouldn’t believe because everything that I delved into had so many layers and such depth and such intricacy and interest. Every scene I would, I would go to rewrite a new scene and I go, Oh my goodness, this scene just seemed to be, to be exposition before it just seemed dry and banal and boring.

And now it seems so alive and vibrant and wonderful. There was, I’m just trying to remember the name, but there was several years ago, uh, second city in Chicago, I think was doing a, um, a series of musical versions that did, I think they did a Hamlet and then they did a Romeo and Juliet. I can’t remember, but they, it was really quite, Oh, it was, I think you’re thinking of West side story.

And it’s, there’s like, there is actually, it’s like sort of more cause there’s like, the prince is kind of like a, a noir cop sort of thing. But it’s very pointed. It’s very, you know, they obviously knew, like, it’s not like they were like, Oh, I kind of know this.

Let’s like, let’s fuck with it. They were like, yeah, you have to know it cold. Yeah.

Um, yes, absolutely. Friar Lawrence is funny that you bring it up because, uh, Romeo and Juliet is one of two Shakespeare plays in which due to conflict between families, uh, two lovers are bereft of each other. And a priest suggests that the woman fake her death to make it better.

The other one being much ado about nothing after the big falling out at the wedding there, the priest at the wedding goes, you know what you should do hero. You should pretend to be dead. Now he doesn’t give her a potion to do.

He says, he says, we’ll have a funeral for you. We’ll pretend to be dead. And then, and then, um, Oh, I, uh, the, uh, Claudius is, is her, her, uh, fiance.

He’ll, he’ll suddenly he’ll forget everything he thought bad about you. And I’ll be like, Oh, I miss her now that she’s dead. And then at, then when he goes to mourn you, you can pop up and be like, ta-da, I’m not dead.

And, uh, and, and he’ll be like, Oh, fantastic. What a great day. Uh, Kalu Kale.

There’s just a significant difference in one. It works out because they get married and the other one, it doesn’t, it goes very bad. There’s a few, I kind of wonder what the fuck was going on in the church at the time.

So the Shakespeare was like, I know a priest is going to just suggest that somebody’s dead. Exactly. Yeah.

Did this happen to, did this happen? This was how Shakespeare met Anne Hathaway the local, the local parish priest in Stratford-upon-Avon. There was a falling out. And he said, you know what you do, Anne, in order to win your boyfriend back, you pretend to be dead and he will love it so much that he’ll, he’ll marry you and write two plays.

Um, and they did and lived happily ever after as this is historic. Well, I said, well, I didn’t say that their marriage was happy. I said, I said they were happy.

And so once they, once he was in London and she was in Stratford, everybody was very, very happy. And every anniversary she would pretend to be dead again and it would re rekindle their, their love. And he would go back to her and then he would, he would be returned to the siren call of this is historically accurate.

This is all happened. It’s all true. It’s as true as the history in Richard III, which is that the names are correct, but I made up the rest.

He made up a lot of it. He did, but to his credit, he was working with some bad sources. Oh yes.

Well, and even, I mean, even the, the, the Richard’s whole deformity, um, you know, that is, uh, an exaggeration when they discovered his skeleton under the car park, or at least what they, they’re 99% sure is his skeleton. They discovered that he had, he did have the slight scoliosis, like a slight bend to his spine, but it would have been such that, you know, a decent clothier could have like patted one of the shoulders and actually, and he would have looked fine, nothing wrong with his arm, nothing wrong with his leg, you know, nothing wrong with, uh, with, with that. So he wouldn’t have been that.

And, and reading up on, on Richard, um, there’s kind of conflict, you know, some people think that he was a horrible tyrant and other people were like, no, that was a smear campaign by Richmond, which I would totally buy given that, that, and it would work too, because every, I think in, within my lifetime, certainly every president and to some extent, prime minister, I think every administration that takes over from the previous one, anytime somebody says, why haven’t you balanced the budget or why, why is there still this or why is it? They go, well, the last guys made it impossible for me to fix it. Every, everybody does it no matter who’s moving in. They go, well, you know, I would, I would be fine, but I was handed such a mess.

You wouldn’t believe what I had, you know, it’s, you know, it went from, from when it went from Bush to Obama, you know, the Obama administration said, well, the reason why everything’s going so bad right now is because Bush put it all in the toilet and Trump’s doing the same thing to the Obama administration. Now I, you know, the credibility of these various organizations is different, but yeah, so I, I tend to believe that the truth usually sits somewhere in the middle. You know, Richard probably was not a brilliant king.

He probably was pretty bad in a lot of ways and he probably did some tyrannical things, but he probably wasn’t the out and out demonic hellish monster that, that we think of him as or that Shakespeare thought of him as, because at some point Richmond probably was like, everybody flocked to Richmond, the good king. I had to kill the last one. Why? Because he was a total monster.

Yes. Yeah, no, no. I mean, there, there are the mistakes that somebody can make when they are king and if they are unprepared for king, that, you know, he was not in the direct line of succession.

No, he only got there cause he killed people, people got killed. That’s right. So it was not like he was raised with the expectation that he would be king.

So he ends up in, in, in a world where, um, he may have wanted to be, but he was unprepared. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. Yeah.

He doesn’t know what he’s doing. So sure. Lots of mistakes.

I’m sure, you know, as, as people are, as the people who are big fans of his will be there to tell you that he did not kill the prince. Well, yes, that, that’s totally unconfirmed and exactly like it’s, it’s so unconfirmed that like as the research that I was doing and as it’s kind of like, it’s really up in the air as to what exactly happened to them. Sure.

Just going on what was probably going on at the time, I would guess that they probably were killed. Um, and but, but did Richard order it or did, did one of his confederates just go, you know, they need to die cause, cause they’re going to grow up and they’re going to try, somebody’s going to try to put them on the throne. Like you don’t want them flooding around.

So if they weren’t, if they weren’t killed, they were certainly exiled to as far away as these guys could ship them because, uh, you don’t want, particularly in the middle of the war of the roses, you know, I mean, they, they feel at that point that they were, it’s been concluded. It turns out it won’t be concluded until Richmond. Uh, but, um, yes.

So they, they, they don’t know exactly what happened with the two princes and it is really, really murky around them because they just, basically it’s not that you hear that they lived or that they died. You just stop hearing about them. And the reason why I would figure that they, they must have died because otherwise somebody would have tried to do something with them.

Now, now they might’ve lived until Richmond took the throne. Richmond might’ve killed them. Um, they might’ve died of disease, which was fairly common.

Not uncommon. They could have been sent away on a ship in the ship tank. Yes.

There could have been, they could have, they could have gone on a holiday and gotten lost and died out in the wilderness. So, you know, like they could have been, you know, roaming through Germany and, uh, Germany not being a particularly welcoming place at that time, you know, they might’ve died there. Actually, I shouldn’t limit that to Germany.

A lot of places in medieval Europe were not very welcoming. It being called the dark ages for a reason. Um, yes.

So, uh, who knows, who knows? And of course, to some extent it’s kind of like, who knows any of it? I mean, like it’s all at a certain point, history is kind of fiction. I mean, if you go back far enough and I mean, yeah, when sources become hard to verify, yeah. Once we get back into oral tradition, for goodness sakes, I mean, you know, the difficulty was with Shakespeare’s, um, uh, plays is for some people that’s history.

Yeah. That’s not, this is, and it may have been for his audience too. Well, and you know, this is actually, I consider this to be still true today.

The times, they aren’t a changing, you know, right. Like, um, the, the thing, you know, if you think about, uh, was the movie, uh, I, Tanya just came out and caused a bunch of controversy of people being like, really makes her seem like super innocent. I didn’t see the film.

No, it’s one of those ones I intend to see, but I never got around to it. But that’s the thing I’ve heard is it makes her seem like very much a victim. Uh, and, and the thing is, I don’t know enough about the incident to actually comment one way or the other, but for a lot of people who are watching that film, it is now true.

Sure. And a lot of people who are watching that film, didn’t know the story in the first place. Yeah.

Um, the, the imitation game, you know, people were, you know, and, and then reading about the imitation game, you read that, you know, he wasn’t the, you know, the imitation game makes it seem like he’s the only code cracker and they’d cracked, they’d already cracked some of the enigma before him. And they don’t, he cracked a specific way or something like that. I don’t, it’s been a while since I read it, but like that was kind of wrong.

Um, it’s, uh, it’s possible or even probable that it wasn’t that he didn’t kill himself, that he died by accident because I’m trying to remember exactly what the articles I read online said, but basically, you know, like it, it’s possible that that, that like, he would just had cyanide in his lab. It was cyanide, wasn’t it? Yeah. And it just, you know, if, if you just, you miss a trace of it and you’re dead.

Right. So like, it’s like, it’s not necessarily even suicide. So like movies and plays and art stories take a particular tack because they’re, they’re delivering you a story you want to see that’s entertaining for you.

Um, Oh, Shakespeare anonymous that the, the, right. You know, I mean, anonymous is, um, I will, I will tell this joke now for the true Shakespeare geeks, um, William Shakespeare, the Earl of Oxford and Marlowe walk into a bar and, uh, it’s jam packed. The place is crowded.

And so it takes the bartender just ages to get them their pints. And by the time he gets back over, all three of them are sitting together and sniggering. And on the table in front of them is a little cocktail napkin on which is scrawled thou art the most lovingly bartender in all of Christendom.

And the bartender slams down their drinks and he says, all right, which one of you wrote this? And I tell that joke as often as I can, because I wrote it, it’s, it’s mine and almost nobody gets it. No, like you have to be, you have to be pretty, uh, and, uh, and, and it’s, it’s one of those, I have a whole back pocket full of these like useless that like I can do a Jiminy impersonation and nobody in my peer groups anyway, really know who Jiminy Glick is. And so it’s basically useless.

I can sing the times they are changing in the style of Glenn Yarborough. Do you know how useful that is? It’s not at all. Right.

So it’s like, um, and so that that joke is kind of the same thing. I wrote this joke and, and, uh, enslaved on it for a small audience, but the audience will get it. I hope you appreciate it.

I hope if you’re listening, you appreciate it. And if you don’t look up the movie anonymous and then listen to the joke again, and you’ll probably get it at that point. Just don’t bother watching movies.

I heard it was good. Actually. I mean, I’m not saying historically accurate.

I’m saying like, I heard it was a good film or an enjoyable film. I didn’t see, I didn’t see it. One of the, one of the issues around that film was I didn’t see it because I knew that I would be sitting there in a rage.

So I never went to see it because I don’t want to make myself angry. There was a time when I was like, I need to feel my rage, but I was a young man then. And, um, that’s why I used to read the Toronto sun for that purpose.

Um, you know, if you’re looking for that kind of political rage, I feel like there are much better outlets than the Toronto sun. Yeah. But, uh, yeah, I feel like you, I feel like you could really get your rage on if you wanted to.

Sure. But you know, a heart and all that stuff. I kind of find it fascinating watching some of those things, not just for the, for the rage element, because sometimes it is kind of fun to whip yourself up into a bit of a frenzy, but sometimes I find myself watching it being like, how is it that you are saying things that are factually correct? And yet I know you are so lying.

Yeah. You know, and, and you kind of, I try to tease them apart. I’m like, oh, okay.

What you’re doing is, and a lot of times, like they set a false premise or something, but it’s very crafty and it’s, it’s crafty to the point where I’m not even sure that they’re necessarily doing it. Like, do you know what I mean? Where like, I feel like they almost, they’re doing it automatically or they could be doing it automatically as much as anything else. Maybe.

I mean, for a lot of them, they’re setting themselves a particular, uh, point of view to view everything like Fox news, for example, their entire purpose is every story. How can we frame this for a right-leaning audience? What is our take on this? And everything goes through that filter. What’s really wild of course, is that, is that like the sun, like they’re not even like Fox isn’t even the most biased source anymore.

Like it’s like, it’s just, it’s like, cause now there’s like so many more options for your fake news. Well, yeah, cause I mean, in order to get on the air, they had to not be as wild and wacky as they perhaps want to be, but in order to get on the air, if the air is the internet, you can be as wild and wacky as you want. There are some wacky dudes out there on the internet and you watch it and you’re like, wow, I can’t, how can you, what’s really amazing, you know, what really amazes me and infuriates me and frustrates me and really, really is troubling is the number of times somebody will put something on Facebook and I’ll take one look at it and go, there’s no way that’s right.

And you run it through scopes and you’re like, yeah, it’s wrong. Like it comes up immediately. You Google search it and it’s wrong.

And you’re like, how did you not run a Google search before you posted it? Well, because people see a thing and it matches their bias. And so they repost it. Yeah.

And you’re just like, and it’s usually, it’s usually something about like a water, you know, like, oh, then the, in the drinking water is the, you know, they put the chemicals in and stuff like that. And you’re like, no, that doesn’t sound right. And a lot of the times it’s when it’s usually the, the, the most, the easiest ones I find the easiest ones to spot are the ones posted by people who, and the narrative basically goes like this, such and such evil company for money, money, money purposes is, is killing people to make their money.

And every time I see one of those, I’m like, you know, I bet that’s not true because evil companies do not want to kill you. They don’t care if you die. No, but if you, if they’re killing you, they’re not getting your money.

Exactly. So I saw one recently that was about, uh, farmers dumping, uh, crop dusting their fields with chemicals right before harvest because it made them slightly weaker. And thus like, uh, it was, it was easier on the machines, the, the threshing machines, you know, to go through the weed.

And so like the wear and tear on those machines was lower and, and you’re like, there’s no way, there’s no way that they are shipping out like grains that will kill you in exchange for like a slightly less wear and tear on a blade. And so like I run it through scopes and sure enough, there’s like tons of evidence. And right in the comment section on this thing, our farmers going, do you know how expensive it is to crop dust your fields? If you’re trying to save money, a slight amount of wear and tear on the blade that is designed to cut wheat in exchange for crop dusting is not the way to do it.

And so you read stuff like this and you’re like, how could you fall for that in the first place? Yeah. Well, it’s a lack of knowledge, right? Yeah. Which is why some of what, uh, uh, has been said about, and the propaganda about Richard the third might actually be absolutely Richmond’s.

Uh, I, I totally believe it. It was, it, I believe it was Richard dies and Richmond immediately is like, you might’ve heard that Richard did some good things for you, but that’s all fake news. So in that, in that, that series where they tackled like the histories, when they got to the end of the, of Richard the third, that speech that Richmond gives was a televised speech, which totally just sort of changed the perception of it.

Well, yes, because, because we’re, I’m suspicious when I see politicians telling me things they’ve heard on TV. Um, absolutely. It was like just seeing him behind the desk, like the, like the prime minister with television cameras and they had like televisions on the stage showing his speech.

And it was just like, Oh, now this changes everything. Yes, it does. It absolutely does.

The context is totally different there. And, and this is one of the things that I actually find the most fascinating about putting on Shakespeare shows, because, you know, for practical reasons, you cut them or at least I have cut them up until now. I feel like you, like there are places where you have to acknowledge that it drags.

So there’s, there’s things that you have to cut. Yes. You know what it actually is for me? I feel like actually you could do every single one of them word for word exactly as written, but you would need such a robust budget because what you would need to do is, is work every single moment so thoroughly that it couldn’t fail.

Um, which means that you need that much more rehearsal time, which is expensive and you need to pay the top actors who can handle that sort of thing. You need to, you need to be casting really great actors in tiny little roles so that they can, they can make it work in ways that nobody ever would have dreamed about. And so basically for me, I don’t have the budget to do Uncut Richard III.

You know, what’s interesting is, is, uh, whenever people talk about cutting Shakespeare, I think about Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, which is an excellent example of why Hamlet doesn’t cut it. I haven’t seen it. I have seen Richard, or I’ve seen, uh, Lawrence Olivier’s Hamlet, which I think is an excellent example of why you can cut it without losing the main thrust of the thing.

Cause it’s two and a half hours long or two and a quarter and, and Hamlet in Uncut is four and change hours long. And so if you can wipe out, I mean, that’s, it’s the same with Richard. We’ve got ours down to, I think, I think plus the intermission, we’re a little over two hours, but depending on whether you’re going by the folio or the quarto, Richard is either the second longest or the longest play in the entire canon.

It’s, I mean, there are scenes in Hamlet that like, and you find this in most of the longer Shakespeare plays, there are things in drag, there are things that the audience in Shakespeare’s day really dug that we don’t. There’s a whole scene in, in, uh, in Hamlet, which is all wordplay that does nothing but it’s wordplay and metaphors for sex, which Shakespeare’s audience was all over. Yeah.

First of all, we’re going to miss half the wordplay or a lot of our audiences. We miss half the wordplay. Now that said some of us, the real Shakespeare geeks amongst us, like I, when my wife and I went to see Macbeth at Stratford a couple of years ago, I’m, you know, the grave digger scene, I’m killing myself laughing.

And we’re sitting in the middle of a bunch of teenagers, a high school group, I believe, had come to see it. And so we’re sort of in that group, which was kind of interesting because like, they’re looking around, like back at me, like, why are you laughing? Like, it’s not funny. Like, what are you laughing at? And, and Jodie afterwards said to me, she was like, it was funny watching them because she’s going, he’s laughing because he gets it.

Yeah. Um, but it’s, yes, this particular scene is not like, it’s not funny anymore. No.

And it goes on for far too long. Well, and that’s the other thing is that you can trim them all back. Absolutely.

There’s a lot of, a lot of bits. And so, you know, the cutting can be, what I don’t like is when people change words so much. I didn’t, I added one line to Richard III.

Um, and it was to cover an entrance because I’d welded two scenes together. Okay. And so it was to cover an entrance that, that didn’t exist in the same context before.

So basically there’s like Richard leaves and his mom comes in and laments and laments all these people and Richard comes back and in our cut, Richard never leaves. And so it was, it seemed odd that he said nothing to his mother for three pages. Um, when, when in the original text, he acknowledges her basically as soon as she’s in the room.

Yes. So I added the line, comfort, mother comfort when she comes in. Um, and I felt that was okay.

I’ve seen productions where they change like whole words. Like I remember there was, since they were doing it in a modern setting, uh, production, uh, of, uh, Taming of the Shrew, um, they added charge cards and cash. Right.

Oh yes. The, the whole, the whole Baz Luhrmann bringing my broadsword and it turns out broadsword is the name brand of the gun he’s got. I don’t even mind that.

Oh really? I mean, I thought it was clever. What I mind is like, I thought it was cute. And we said charge cards and cash, not like we, like we like threw a whole like modern references into the text.

Yeah. And I’m not into that. No, I, I, I’m not a big fan of most productions that move the play for a variety of reasons.

First of all, I find that they do it to be cute. Look what we did. We changed all the, all the money to charge cards.

They’re like, yeah, that’s adorable. Or like, Hey, look, I’ve got a cell phone and I’ve received a message from my messenger and everybody’s winking. And you’re like, yes, it’s adorable that you’ve done that.

But there’s no point to it. Sure. Um, the other thing that I find that it does when they move the context, it can often, it makes sense.

Like they’ll pick a time period. They’ll move it where it’s like 80% of the text comes alive and when you go, Oh, I never thought about that before. But the other 20%, you’re like, okay, this doesn’t make any sense anymore.

Yeah. You know, so for instance, in, uh, in much ado about nothing, when you move it to a modern context, there’s the whole big speech that Beatrice has. If I were a man, I would eat his heart in the marketplace and all that kind of stuff.

It makes sense in an era when women can’t challenge men to duels and when they wouldn’t have been trained in combat and when she couldn’t have, because they’re fighting with swords, she couldn’t have overpowered him with swords and weaponry. It does not make any sense in an era when, when women are more than welcome to, to fight men if they would like. And in an era when the gun is a pretty big equalizer, not that it requires no skill to use, but if you walk up behind somebody and pull a trigger, you know, it’s, it’s easier to do that than, than, than not or even walk in front.

Anyway. So that changes. The third thing that I find that moving the context does is that it actually, I think pigeonholes it into one thing.

So, you know, if you make Romeo and Juliet about the conflict in the Middle East, you make the, you know, Montagues, the Arabs and the Capulets, the, the, uh, Israelis, then what you’ve done is you’ve made a play about the Middle East. When, if you make Romeo and Juliet and you keep it in its original context, it’s kind of distanced from us. We see it as sort of a thing.

And because of that distancing, I find then it’s easy to apply that template over all of our lives. And we go, and so if it’s done correctly, um, if it’s done well, Romeo and Juliet wearing the doublets and hoes, you’ll watch it and go, oh, this is about the Middle East. Oh, this is about Democrats and Republicans.

Oh, this is about, and you’ll be able to apply it everywhere instead of just to one context. And so I find that when we get too specific with Shakespeare, we actually limit it as opposed to broadening it out. What’s interesting is I’ve seen some effective productions of Shakespeare where they don’t specify a period.

Yes. And I, that I think is great. Where they just sort of like, we’re wearing what’s right for this character.

Yeah. We’re not like, yeah, this is taking place. It’s, it’s more abstract or, or it’s a mishmash or something like that.

Yes. I, I enjoy that. And that’s not to say I’ve never enjoyed a recontextualized Shakespeare or I’m not saying I’m right either.

And I, I, and I know plenty of people who prefer to move it and who like it and get stuff out of that. And so this is just my personal feelings on the whole thing. Sure.

I’ve seen some productions that I’ve been involved in some productions that get very conceptual with Shakespeare. And the problem is that, um, they, their concept when you can be very clever with the concept, but it gets in the way of Shakespeare. So like every time you’re trying to tell your story, you’re like hitting up against the wall.

It’s actually Shakespeare’s cause you’re trying to get clever than the writing, which is already some of the cleverest writing in the world. And, and so to do that is, is, is to do it in injustice. Um, and so, yeah, you don’t want to fight it.

I took a Shakespeare workshop recently. And that, one of the things the guy said, now he’s talking about acting styles, but he’s like, a lot of actors are kind of fighting it. Exactly what you’re saying.

We’re trying to apply all this stuff. And he’s like, just don’t fight the text, just speak it well. And it kind of comes through.

Um, a good example, I actually think of, of moving. It was, uh, much do about nothing and in modern dress in the Joss Whedon film version. And I liked, I liked that film.

And one of the reasons I didn’t mind it in that was because it didn’t feel like they were making a point. They weren’t saying, oh, this is about this modern conflict or, oh, this is this, or this is that it almost felt more like, um, we’re in modern dress because we have these suits and we didn’t have doublets and hose in our closets. And so we got these instead.

And so, because they didn’t, they weren’t pushing it into my face all the time. I could kind of forget that they were in suits and, and I could just see the production again. Um, and I could just appreciate the words, which is really what you’re trying to do.

You’re just trying to make somebody appreciate the production and appreciate the show. You don’t want, if all the trappings are what’s interesting, then just have people dress up in interesting trappings and walk around on stage. Sure.

I mean, there, I mean, people will sometimes say that’s what they’ve been doing in Stratford for years. There’s, there’s, um, did you ever watch Slings and Arrows? I did. I’ve watched, I have not watched the entire thing.

I watched, uh, part of it, but yeah. I remember the first season. There’s a lot of talk about the costumes and, and you know, there’s like some blocking that’s done so that they’ll be able to see the costume there.

It’s like, well, that’s real insane about it for years. You know what though? There’s nothing wrong with that either. But, but, and I’ll point out the difference of what I mean now versus then there’s a difference between, between taking, you know, Oh, my re-imagined Shakespeare, which is just on the moon.

And I’m going to shove the costume in your face because I’m saying like, see, look at the political points I’m making that I feel condescended to. Whereas if you’ve got a really great costume and you want to parade it in front of me so that I’ll go, Ooh, I’m okay with that. I’m okay with that.

And I’m okay. And the other reason not to move Shakespeare, this is the other thing is the sword fighting because by cracky, like if you go and see sword fighting on stage, that’s a lot of fun and it’s a lot of fun to do. We have in, in, in our production of Richard, we have, I built, I didn’t build, my father-in-law built a shield that Richard has.

And it’s this massive, it’s like 30 inches across. It’s this huge round shield and shield combat on stage is a lot of fun because every other hit on stage is fake hit. You’re missing by that much.

You pull back at the last second. You know, your punch doesn’t actually connect. It’s all fake, but not a shield because a shield is exactly what a shield is at all times, a big block of something that you can strike.

And so we smash on this shield and it’s great because you get to watch people hit a shield. And there’s that solidity to the combat. That’s very interesting.

Well, I mean, that’s the thing about, about, about swordplay and why it is so effective in, in, in Shakespeare is because like, there’s, there is a contact there. Even if you don’t like, even not the, the stabbing, it’s the, there is the inherent, the visceral feeling of like metal on metal, also the fact that like you’re swinging these things around, which essentially can hurt. Exactly.

And if we did it wrong, we would get hurt, but we don’t, we spend hours and hours and hours doing it. And, and it’s, it’s so much fun to watch. On Julius Caesar, we did spears and I’d never done spear combat on stage before.

That’s a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun. A harrowing if the audience is unprepared for what that can mean though, but in a good way.

Yeah. Right. Yeah.

The feedback that I got from our audiences, they very much enjoyed it. And, and yeah, you know, I remember talking to, I’ve talked to several groups of actors about it, but like, you know, I’m kind of like, I want to see, I want to see combat when I go to see Shakespeare. I mean, I don’t want to see combat in, you know, well, I’m trying to think of one where there isn’t combat.

I mean, not, not necessarily like violent, horrible, we’re going to kill each other combat, but like, you know, don’t you want to see Oberon like, you know, use a slapstick on Puck. Shit. You know, there’s comedy of errors.

You want to see, uh, uh, Dromeo get his butt kicked. Yeah. You know, you want to see all kinds of, you want to see the three stooges, you want to see a different type of violence, but you still want to see it.

And audiences came to see it. There’s certain expectations that audiences have. Um, like you can’t cut any of the big lines in Shakespeare.

You know, you, Julius Caesar is full of them by the way. Right. Like there’s, it’s, it’s gotta have some of the most per capita, like of our opinion, you know, et tu Brute.

Um, uh, the fault dear Brutus is in, not in our stars, but in ourselves. Um, uh, friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears, you know, like on and on. And if you cut any one of those things, people would walk out feeling like they wanted their money back.

Of course, because they, they, they, they, there’s like, oh, there’s one thing I know in this play. And that is if we shadows have offended, you know, it’s like, yes, it’s this don’t take that away from you. Yeah, exactly.

And, and, and I want to see it. Sure. Um, I heard a story in an interview once with Mandy Patinkin and he talked about how, cause he does the opera singing and he talks about it when he does concerts.

Um, he can sing the most beautiful arias perfectly. He can sing notes. Nobody’s heard before.

He can sing the, he can sing it in such a way that anybody would weep and it doesn’t matter the best reaction he can possibly get is if he is, if he stands center stage with an audience and says, hello, my name is Inigo Montoya, prepare to die. And if he says that they go nuts because that’s what we want to see. And I’m a big fan of giving audiences what they want to see.

Sure. I’m too many artists I’ve known kind of get, uh, into this whole weird place where we’re kind of like, no, I want to, uh, it’s, it’s, it’s the, it’s the dark side. If there is a dark side, a darker side of the bouffant, right? Like the idea of like, I’m going to be grotesque.

I think that there’s a lot of great things about that, but the impulse from a lot of actors is I’m going to make my audience hate me and like hate being here. And I’m like, why would you make them hate being here? I understand why you want to explore the grotesque and why you want to explore things that are uncomfortable, but I still want my audience to walk out going, boy, I was really glad I bought that ticket. Well, there, they should come out and I think if you do bouffant or clowning, well, they will do that.

But, but, um, but a lot of artists seem to want to punish their audiences. They go, I only want to do, I only want to do confusing, you know, just, just, you know, avant-garde push the envelope. I just, I only want to do this kind of stuff.

I don’t want to have a sword fight. I don’t want to have a cool costume. I don’t want to have a funny character.

And, and again, back to Shakespeare, he had everything for everybody. He had romance, he had hate, he had envy, he had beautiful poetry for the poetry lovers. He had conflict and dialogue for the true dramatists.

And he had the grave digger scene for the people, the groundlings sitting on the stage at the front booing and heckling until you brought out somebody funny to get hit in the face with a pie. Right. He had everything for everybody and he weaves it together in such a way that it all works most of the time, unless it’s the Merry Wives of Windsor, which we’ve established is terrible.

Somebody’s going to write me and say the Merry Wives of Windsor is my favorite Shakespeare and here’s why you’re wrong. And for that person, uh, for the record, I’m joking right now and I’ve never actually read the play, so I’m not actually commenting on it. Um, but, uh, uh, but yes.

Um, anyway, so, uh, Princess Bride back to that is a great example of, it’s got everything for everybody. It does. In fact, there’s beautiful character things.

There’s metafiction throughout the play. It’s like, it’s got that element to it. So that like clever intellectual metafiction is running around.

Um, it’s got comedy, it’s got adventure, it’s got love, it’s got romance, it’s got everything for everybody. And it weaves it all together in one great package that everybody can enjoy. Strangely, the marketing department didn’t get this memo and managed to make one of the worst movie trailers of all time.

That’s very true because, uh, the Princess Bride didn’t, was not successful in its first. And that doesn’t surprise me watching that trailer. The trailer is appalling.

I remember because I, I mean, by the time I watched it, I, I, I didn’t, I didn’t bother seeing the trailer. Somebody said, watch this. It’s great.

Only, it only became, I think it really much like Clue. It only became Clue’s great in like, in, in VHS and DVD. People were like, I saw it in the theater, but I don’t like not a lot of people did.

I fell in love with it in theater, but again, most people did not. If you watch it, I think you fall in love with it. Princess Bride.

I can understand why somebody wouldn’t like Clue. It’s not until it was on VHS and you had all of the endings that people started to really enjoy. Yeah.

Yeah. Clue. Clue is great.

I remember watching it. There was a, I think it was like a whole weekend that for some reason, basically my entire family were out. Like my brothers had gone to hang out with their friends all weekend.

As a child, I didn’t have friends. And, and my parents were somewhere. And so like, I was like, I was a movie kid.

Right. So I’m like, I’m like, it’s movie time. Right.

So like anytime, like movies are on TV, I was like, movie time. And so like, I watched, I watched Clue and I watched Still Crazy, the British, it’s basically like, this is Spinal Tap, but scripted. Michael McKean connection.

How about that? Though he’s not in Still Crazy. Anyways, but so like, I watched a ton of these movies and, and, and Clue was one of them. And I was like, oh, that’s amazing.

And just as soon as it ended and then it goes, or it might have gone like this. I was like, oh, that’s brilliant. Oh, that’s brilliant.

That there is no conclusion. And just what a great cast. As Tim Curry, I’m sure has been in terrible movies, but has Tim Curry ever been terrible? I don’t think so.

I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I saw somebody online posted one time.

So they said, you can tell a lot about a person by where they know Tim Curry from. And I went, yeah, that’s probably true. You know, Clue, Muppet Treasure Island, Rocky Horror Picture Show.

For me, it would have been, it would have been Rocky Horror Picture Show. But for somebody, it’s legend. For somebody, it’s legend.

For me, the first time I think I saw Tim Curry was Muppet Treasure Island, I think. I don’t think I saw him in anything else. And so I think that’s probably where I know him most from.

But I think I associate him more with Clue, actually, interestingly. I’ve probably seen it more times. Because like any true cult classic, as soon as I discovered it.

You watched it incessantly. Well, and bothered other people until they would watch it with me, right? We have to watch Clue. We have to watch Clue, you know, like just, oh, you haven’t seen Clue? Yeah.

Yes. So Richard III, you opened on Thursday. And you’re running until? We’re running until next Saturday.

So the number is the 24th. The 24th. And you are, is that the staircase? It’s at the staircase.

$20 cash at the door or brown paper tickets online if you want to pre-order them. And as I said, we’ve cut it way, way down, so you will not be there for four hours. And as I said, there’s great fighting, so you’ll have a lot of fun.

And it’s, yeah, it’s been a lot of fun to do. It’s one of the best casts I’ve ever assembled. I’m very proud of my ability to assemble great casts.

And I think that that’s nine-tenths of work in theater, particularly if you’re directing or producing. It’s just, it’s like, no, you need a great cast. And then easily half your work is done for you because they bring so much to the table and then you just tweak it instead of needing to like build a whole thing.

Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, it’s, I’m super pleased with the cast. They’re a great cast.

And not only are they great, but they’re great fun to work with, you know, because that’s the other thing is you can assemble a team of really brilliant artists and you just hate being in a room with them. And it’s magic on stage and then you go backstage and everybody just huffs off to a corner, which I don’t think I’ve ever actually had that happen. I’ve never actually had that, but I don’t want to be a part of it.

No, I’ve heard of it and I don’t want it. I never need that experience ever. Well, Ryan, thank you so much.

Thank you.