Review: Danai Gurira Makes a Sleek Supervillain of Richard III

Richard of Gloucester may be the killingest character in Shakespeare, personally knocking off or precipitating the deaths of more than a dozen people who get in his way. To be fair, he does so over the course of three plays, while top competitors like Macbeth and Titus Andronicus have just one.

Still, lacking a prophecy, a particular vengeance or a bloody-minded wife to flesh out his motives, Richard remains the most mysterious in his evil; to make a success of the fabulous mess that is “Richard III,” you must decide what to do about that.

The tonally wobbly and workmanlike revival that opened on Sunday at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park doesn’t decide. Whether Richard chooses his evil in reaction to the world’s revulsion — a “lump of foul deformity” is one of the nicer descriptions of him — or whether he was merely born to be bad is a question the Public Theater production, starring the tireless Danai Gurira as Richard, does not reach. We never learn what Richard means by the word “determined” when, in his first speech, he says that “since I cannot prove a lover/I am determined to prove a villain.” Is he bent on villainy, or was he pre-bent?

Actually, in Robert O’Hara’s staging, that speech no longer comes first. In a sign that he will focus on action and not psychology, O’Hara instead opens with the gruesome final scene of “Henry VI, Part III,” the immediately preceding play in Shakespeare’s chronicle of 15th-century royal intrigue. In O’Hara’s characteristically droll take on awfulness, Richard coolly stabs King Henry to death, for good measure stuffing the corpse’s mouth with the royal pennant and wiping his knife on it too.

As a means of showing us that Richard intends to replace the Lancasters on the throne with the Yorks — including, as soon as possible, himself — this is highly effective. And Gurira, the fierce General Okoye of the “Black Panther” films, certainly never disappoints as an action hero. Looking like a supervillain in black knee-high boots and stretch denim trousers, with her hair shaved into heraldic patterns, she is unflaggingly energetic, vocally thrilling and, as events become more hectic, more and more convincing.

But for much of the play, the flash and fury of her performance, with its surface swagger and glary stares, too often feel like decoys. As Richard schemes his way from the sidelines to the throne, dispatching two young princes along the way, we get his gall but not his emotion, even as his words tell us that he understands the monstrousness of his methods. “Was ever woman in this humor wooed?” he asks after proposing marriage to Lady Anne, whose husband he has just murdered. As staged by O’Hara, the seduction is humorous in the comic sense too, involving a trick knife, a humongous ring, and a moment when Richard, sitting on the corner of the bier, brushes some part of the inconvenient body aside as if it were a crumb.

And bodies, not just body counts, are crucial in “Richard III.” It’s worth noting that Ali Stroker, this production’s Anne, uses a wheelchair. Richard’s aggrieved mother, the Duchess of York (Monique Holt), uses sign language. So does one of the assassins, played by Maleni Chaitoo. Gregg Mozgala, in two important roles — Edward IV, who succeeds the dead Henry, and Richmond, the play’s hero, who eventually kills Richard — has cerebral palsy.

Though they all have excellent moments, the admirably diverse casting only underlines for me the problem of a Richard who is not disabled. For centuries, of course, that has been the norm; mostly the role has been played by actors sporting more-or-less absurd humps, lumps, prostheses and braces to simulate the “bunch-back’d toad” described in the text. When Arthur Hughes, an actor with radial dysplasia, took the role at the Royal Shakespeare Company this summer, he was thought to be the first disabled person ever to do so at that theater.

It is nice to dream of a time when disabled actors are employed so frequently, and in so many kinds of roles, that we need not discourage others from playing this one. And it’s true that the historical Richard probably suffered from nothing more than scoliosis, as an analysis of his recently discovered skeleton suggests. Shakespeare, I’ve said before, was a poet, not an osteopath.

But what was once the norm can now seem a kind of ableist mummery, which this production attempts to sidestep by offering a Richard with no physical impairments at all. When other characters, and even the man himself, scorn his disabilities and mock his ugliness, we are forced by the evidence of our senses to treat the derision metaphorically. (Richard, we tell ourselves, is morally toadlike, not physically so.) And though I usually enjoy being asked to see familiar characters in unfamiliar skins, in this case the sidestep blocks access to the deepest elements of the drama.

Those elements are what keep the otherwise ragged “Richard III” in the repertory. The verse is extraordinarily pungent and the questions obviously eternal. When a production has us asking to what extent Richard’s evil is the product of people’s hatred of him, as opposed to his prior hatred of himself, it forces us to ask the same of our own leaders. In this season of our discontent, the scene in which Richard cynically holds up a Bible as a ginned-up crowd clamors to make him king is one you may find familiar.

Though we don’t get to ask those profound questions in this production, there are nevertheless compensations. The staging itself is lovely, with Myung Hee Cho’s revolving circles of gothic arches speeding the action and suggesting the inexorability of Richard’s rise and fall. (The arches are lit in beautiful pinks and purples by Alex Jainchill.) Dede Ayite’s witty mixed-period costumes score sociological points at a glance, from Anne’s tacky trophy-wife regalia to the doomed young princes’ spangly gold sneakers.

Glistening too are some of the performers in secondary roles, which, in this play, means all roles but Richard. Sanjit De Silva turns Buckingham, the king’s chief enabler, into a hopped-up hype man, high on the fumes of ambient amorality. Paul Niebanck makes a powerful impression as Richard’s brother George, who incorrectly believes he can talk his way out of anything. And as Queen Margaret, the widow of Henry, Sharon Washington demonstrates with brutal efficiency how specific hatred can soon become general, blistering everyone, even herself, in its path.

But these coherently interpreted characters do not add up to a coherent interpretation of the play, which wobbles between shouty polemics and a kind of Tudor snark. It may be that “Richard III” is in that sense uninterpretable; written to flatter Shakespeare’s royal sponsors, who were descendants of the victorious Richmond, its brilliance has always borne the sour odor of propaganda. That sourness is not sweetened by the fact that, to modern noses, the good guys smell a lot like the bad ones. If history plays cannot untangle for us what history itself leaves a jumble, they should at least help us figure out why.

Richard III
Through July 17 at the Delacorte Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes.