Lord, let me get through this one without an off-color joke.
OK, Teenage Dick is one of those "Shakespeare Adjacent" plays you might find at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Not the Bard, nor even his verbiage in a new setting, but still related to the Shakespearean canon to that playgoers go in with something that feels like a reference point.
In this case, Richard III set in a high school.
Yeah, I know. It has been done. 10 Things I Hate About You. West Side Story. Heck, the play itself even references Clueless, which was an updated Jane Austen's Emma, for god's sake. It is everything old is new again, filtered through high school melodrama and twitter-based technology.
Except it isn't. Yes, Richard Gloucester is a disabled young man (cerebral palsy), bullied and picked on, and has evolved a nasty attitude that mirrors that of his Shakespearean namesake. And he sets his sites on wresting the senior presidency from pretty boy jock Eddie Ivy (Edward IV), and part of his plan involves going to the big dance with the Eddie's ex-girlfriend, Anne Margaret (Anne Neville). Richard is mentored by off-kilter teacher Elizabeth York (Elizabeth of York), aided by fellow disabled frenemy Barbara Buckingham (Duke of Buckingham), and opposed by christian student Clarissa Duke (Duke of Clarence). The names are familiar, as is the starting point for the play. Here is man who feels himself scorned, who plans for vengeance, pulls out all stops to get it, and ultimately dies for it. His twisted mortal form that hides a black heart.
But. This is set in a high school and the stakes are slightly lower (and in reality more intense) than England's throne. And Richard, unlike the black-hearted villain of Shakespeare's history, actually has serious doubts about what he truly wants as he starts to break out of his self-imposed shell, such that actually, his decisions carry some weight, and we start to wonder - can the blackguard be redeemed?
But this is Shakespeare, and you know the answer to that. Much of the play is Machiavellian Chess with Teenage Richard putting his plans into motion, wallowing in his own cleverness. Then he falls for a dream he did not see coming and, once he makes his resolution, things turn very savage very fast. There is no Earl of Richmond here to carry home the point here, to make better promises for the future. The ultimate damage is self-inflicted. It is very much a tragedy.
The actors are excellent. MacGregor Arney is a transformed Richard, his twisted body turning more controlled and mannered when he turns from his fellow actors to soliloquize to the audience, selling the double-faced nature of Richard's treachery. But Rheanna Atendido is absolutely fantastic in a role (Ann) that, under Shakespeare, was merely a stepping stone for Richard's conquest. Here playwright Lew gives her the moment she needs to drive Richard's cruelty home, and she kicks everything up several notches in the process. The Rep is pushing the play as satiric, which seems to undersell it. It takes the tropes (both Shakespeare and high school PTSD) and melds it into something stronger than either.
The original play was propaganda, of course. Richard was the last of the York rulers, and succeeded by the first of the Tudors (Richmond becomes Henry VII), of which the then-current ruler Elizabeth I was very much in present tense. So any historical play which blackened the name of the last York King would be well-received in court, and Shakespeare hangs a brace of bodies around Richard's neck. And in the centuries since, there is a lot written on how most of Shakespeare's reporting on the man was invention, or stealing from other sources that were equally skewed. Yet it is the theatrical Richard that survives in our minds, and the source which this play mines.
Teenage Dick succeeds in that it builds from a known base, and takes the discussion in a new direction. Lew internalizes Richard's own struggles even more than Shakespeare does, both broadening and deepening his emotions and reasons. Young Richard is hot garbage in a shirt, but a sympathetic villain none the less. It is a hard thing to pull off, and the play does so admirably.
More later.
