Better Know an Actor: Ben Curns

 Note: due to adult themes and language, this interview is intended for mature readers.

When did you first know that you would be playing Richard?

Ben Curns: Back in 2008, the Artistic Director, Jim Warren, and the Associate Artistic Director/Casting Director, Jay McClure, were talking about starting the Henry VI trilogy. Obviously they’re going to start with Part One, and generally they send an email out [to the regular resident actors] saying, “Are you interested in this season? If you are, which parts are you interested in?” The part that I liked the most was York, which was also the part that René [Thornton, Jr.] was interested in. So essentially the casting director was like, “You guys need to sort of figure out what you want to do.” I said I didn’t really mind, because I also really wanted to play [Vindice] in The Revenger’s Tragedy. So he got [York] and I got Humphrey, Duke of Gloucestor, and I really enjoyed playing him. René was really excited because he thought that maybe after I died playing Gloucester I could play Jack Cade. The casting director was like, “He’s not going to play Jack Cade.” So I feel like he had the idea: “He’s going to play York’s son, Richard.” So from then on, I remember telling my mother, “If I get this part, it could mean that they want me for the next two winters, and ultimately in 2012 I’m going to play Richard III.”

Benjamin Curns in 3 Henry VI. Photo by Tommy Thompson.

So you had Richard in mind, certainly by the time you reached 3 Henry VI?

We sign contract to contract so nothing is ever set in stone, but when they brought me back to play Richard in 3 Henry VI I felt like it was sort of… likely. It was likely. But, you know, I didn’t count anything as definite. What I liked about that and what I still like about that is it says, “Nobody’s going to hand you anything. If you want to play that part you better be great in the first two parts that he appears in.” Make a statement. Make them realize that they’ve done a good thing and they’ve made good choices and they can trust you with a part not only of this size but of this responsibility. Especially in 3 Henry VI, he’s going to be one of the characters that the press writes about. He and Margaret are going to be the face of 3 Henry VI. So you want to do right by the company and by your cast and then also as an artist, you want to be great. The part is so wonderful – he has so much more to do in 3 Henry VI than he does in 2 Henry VI. You figure out so much stuff about him. You know that speech he does in the middle of Part Three? He’s saying, “You want to come back next year and see me do a lot more of this.”

One of the biggest decisions when playing Richard is figuring out his physicality. How did you go about shaping his deformity? In the production, you have a hump, a withered arm, and a leg brace, which causes you to walk with a pronounced limp.

Even in 2 Henry VI, people talk about his hunchback. I don’t know if there’s much about a limp, but in Part Two the Cliffords are like, “He’s ugly and he’s bunchbacked.” So when we did Part Two, which was much more of an early modern dress production, for me the whole thing was: can I find something that I can fit a hump over and still fit into? So I kept going through all of René’s clothes. In [Part Two] we really just did the hump and I wore gloves on both hands, since he’s on the battlefield anyway, so we didn’t make much out of the hand. My personal choice in Part Two was to not make anything out of the leg, but to have a wound that Somerset gives him in the play be the impetus behind his leg injury.

So that’s where the limp came from?

That was my take on it. I don’t know how other people do it, but we thought it would be a cool way to do it. Certainly once you get into 3 Henry VI and Richard III there’s a lot more talk about how he was born like that, but given the information I had in 2 Henry VI, I thought it was sort of cool. And I think it’s interesting, especially in fight situations, to try and empower both people, to give both of them status. I felt like for Somerset to get a wound in says something about him. He’s smaller than [Richard] but he’s still a lord, he’s still got years of military training.

You cut Richard III to make the performance script. How did you start that process, and what does the process entail?

I did the cut for 3 Henry VI as well, and Jay [McClure], our associate artistic director, seemed to like it. So moving into Richard III, which is so much more Richard’s play, my feeling is that they thought, “You should probably be the one to decide what you say and what you don’t. We want to try and keep it to two hours. Do what you can.” For me, I feel like I can always cut it down to two hours. The hardest thing is to do it with so few people. Especially in these early Shakespeare plays; I think there’s a lot of evidence to say they had closer to 20 people in their cast. There’s a moment in 4.4 where Richard enters, and in our production he comes out alone, but the stage direction says he comes out with trumpeters and drummers and soldiers. He comes out with a whole battalion, which means that that poor battalion has to stand there through that scene, which is 30 minutes long. So I’m sure the cast is very happy to not have to do that. For me that’s the challenge.

The cutting was fun. The first act was the hardest to cut, given that’s when you meet so many characters, so you want to hear who these people are and endow them with some sort of information, but you always want to keep it clipped. Once I got past the first act, it was much easier. Just slashing and burning. I bet the next time I see a full length Richard III I’ll say, “Oh, that’s a great line, I can’t believe I cut that line!” I’ve been pretty fortunate that most of the feedback about the cut has been positive, in saying it’s streamlined but it’s not any more Richard-centric than the play already is. It’s not as if I said, “We’re just going to get rid of this stuff so I have more time to talk.”

How much is cut for practical reasons and how much for artistic? For example, it’s often said that the scrivener’s scene in Act Three is there to give the illusion of time passing between the two big Richard/Buckingham scenes that bookend it, so it often gets cut, but your production kept it in. What was the thought behind that?

In the case of the scrivener, I don’t think it’s just to separate those Richard/Buckingham scenes. I feel like that’s how most people look at it, but what I think is important about the scrivener is that he’s talking about this legal document to justify the state-sponsored execution of Hastings as a traitor. That says something about Richard and Buckingham: at this point they are still ostensibly trying to operate within the confines of the law. They’re not just murdering people in their sleep. They’re saying, “We have evidence to say this guy is a traitor!” It’s all trumped up, of course, it’s all BS, but when people come asking questions, they’ve got this document. You see tyrants in history do this all the time: they try to rig elections and stuff to make themselves really look legitimate. I feel like Buckingham needs that. Buckingham is sort of [Richard’s] spokesman; he says, “I’m the one who’s going to be out there talking to the people, and when they ask me about this I want to have an answer.” He’s on Richard’s side, you know, but it has to have some sort of legal façade. That’s what I like about the scrivener.

There are some personnel things that our cast size just forbids us from doing. I got a lot of heat when we did 3 Henry VI about cutting this character Montgomery. He’s a Yorkist supporter who essentially comes to offer Edward military assistance to take the crown. Edward says, “I’m not quite ready to go for the crown yet,” and Montgomery says, “Okay, then I’m going to take my soldiers away.” And then Richard says, “You should just take the crown now; we should take this help while we’ve got it.” But I’m thinking, “We don’t have a guy to play Montgomery, and we certainly don’t have seven more guys to come on with Montgomery to suggest the army that he has.” It’s tough. We don’t want a four hour production. In the past we’ve generally had an intern from Mary Baldwin in the cast, and this year we didn’t. Jay even said, “Do you want another person?” And I said, “No, I want to see if we can do it.” If we’d had that other person, we would have had more ghosts, certainly. But you know, we make do.

There are some interesting changes in exits and entrances – there’s that moment when Tyrell is accepting your orders to murder the princes in the tower, and in the Folio, Buckingham enters after he exits. But René enters as you’re finishing the order, and thus overhears everything. Was that in the cut or was it his decision?

I didn’t even know he was there. So I would say that was René’s decision. It’s a big scene for their relationship. I have that great line: “hath he so long held out with me untired / and stops he now for breath?” Where did this conscience of yours come from, Buckingham? All of a sudden? And René, as a good actor, says, “No, he has to draw a line somewhere. [Richard] has no line.” “Oh, so it’s okay to throw around the head of Hastings, it was okay to kill Rivers and Grey, all that was fine?” “They weren’t kids!”

One of my favorite books is Year of the King, by Anthony Sher. It talks about his journey getting ready to play Richard at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Tell me about your “year of the king.” How did you get ready for this part?

Having worked here for so long, I can draw on all these things I’ve learned from other parts that I’ve played. Going into Richard, not only did I have the advantage of playing Richard in 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI, but also of having played Iago [in Othello] and Face in The Alchemist – which is a comedy but which is entirely about deceiving people and playing characters and trying to manipulate people into doing what you want them to do – playing Mephistopheles in Dr. Faustus; characters who sort of show people one thing while they’re holding something else behind their back. And I played Caliban [in The Tempest], who is something other than human and has confidence issues in himself, and misses his mother. You have all these things, and they kind of serve as a training ground.

To get more specific, I learned a lot with Caliban about actor movement and physicality and telling stories with something other than normal movement. I’m not a movement guy – there are people who have lots of training in that sort of stuff and I really don’t have much. It’s sort of an area that I’m uncomfortable with, so I just threw some stuff out there to see what sticks. But it’s sort of better with Richard having had six months doing Caliban. And Face is such a huge part. The side was 63 pages. So I was taught a lot about endurance, you know, just sort of “go, go, go, go!” And Iago obviously is the big one because it taught me a lot about “villains” being justified in their actions if you can look at the situation through their eyes then you can be the hero of your own story.

So that was my big thing about going in to play Richard. He’s been, in my opinion – I feel like it has to be in my opinion – all those things he says, he says it starts with God or heaven. He even says that in 3 Henry VI. He says “You duped me from the start. You gave everybody in the race a head start except me. You brought me into this amazing family, and I look like a freak, and nobody likes me, and I can’t run as fast, and I can’t speak as well, and I can’t chase girls.” He dedicates himself to his father’s cause, only to have his father and his little brother taken away from him in the course of the battle – for which I think he feels partly responsible since he convinced his father to fight that battle – just to be working his ass off for halfwits and people he doesn’t think are as deserving as he is. Like his brother, [Edward]. He looks at everyone else in the play and thinks, “You’ve had all these amazing gifts given to you. What have you done with them? You’ve squandered them. I had none of those gifts; I had to work much harder to get all of these things, so I deserve them more. I had to work; they were just handed to you.”

That’s why I love that line: “Ere you were queen, yea, or your husband king / I was a packhorse in his great affairs.” [Richard is saying]: Don’t ever forget how you got the stuff that you have. You did it with my blood and my sweat. You lifted not a finger to have all of your fancy clothes and live in this fancy house. I had to kill a lot of people for you to get that, and now you’re just going to invite your family in and give them land I fought for? I don’t think so. I learned that from playing Iago: [the other characters] all deserve what they get. How much have I had to take over my life? It’s time to dish it out. Let [the others] be miserable for a while.

My “year of the king” was more like three months of the king, because we rehearsed the show so fast. I feel like with a longer rehearsal process, I would have more time to play and more time to figure out exactly what it is I want to do. We opened with, “Here’s a thought of what I think I want to do.” I was very fortunate to get some feedback from some very smart people in my cast about some of the things I was doing. I always try to take that to heart and try to incorporate that into what I was doing. The longer you do it, and particularly in our playhouse, the more you learn about what you’re doing and how you feel about it.

I read a lot of books. I guess that falls under the whole “year of the king” banner as well, this research I was doing, I couldn’t stop once we opened. I didn’t feel like I was done. I just wanted to keep reading stuff. And the more stuff I read I was just like, “This is usable.” It’s not extra-textual; it only proves how insightful and smart Shakespeare was. He’s profiling killers, and he’s in the minds of some really awful people long before the idea of psychology came around and people started diagnosing other people’s problems. He knows what [the problems] are, he knows what causes them, and he writes them into his characters.

What books did you read?

The first thing I read was a Brecht play that René gave me called The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui, which is a story about a gangster, but it’s a parable for the rise of fascism in Germany. He gave it to me for my birthday and said, “Anyone who’s going to play Richard III should know this play.” And the prologue even says, “Here’s the main character. Doesn’t he look like Richard III?” I really enjoyed that play because it had some of that stuff I was talking about with the scrivener: this guy trying to make things look legitimate. He doesn’t want to come down too heavy. There’s this great scene where he hires an actor to come in to instruct him on how to speak and how to move in front of large groups of people. I thought that was great because Richard is such an actor, such a consummate performer at all times.

In 3 Henry VI he says, “I’ll set the murderous Machivel to school,” so I went back and read The Prince by Machiavelli. I read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Then I read this volume on serial killers by Peter Vronsky [Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monster]. When I finished that I read The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule, which is a book about Ted Bundy. I guess I was interested in that guy because most of the accounts of him are that he was really charming. He didn’t look like a derelict or some kind of freak. He was very handsome and well spoken and reputed to be pretty funny, but he had this hidden dark side. I thought, “Well that reminds me of this guy that I’m playing.” He’s able to convince some people that he’s a normal guy. And then Dan Kennedy saw me reading that, and he brought me a book called The Anatomy of Motive written by a former FBI agent, John Douglas, who essentially started the FBI profiling program. That was incredibly cool, and incredibly helpful, especially because he’s able to make some generalizations – he says the cases are all different, but some of the generalizations that he made, I was kind of like, “Richard might not fall into this category like a cookie cutter but he shares some of these things.” This idea of manipulation, domination and control.

Allison Glenzer and Benjamin Curns in Richard III. Photo by Tommy Thompson.

He’s obsessed with it. He wants to be the one in charge, and he wants to dictate the terms. It’s when he doesn’t have those things that he gets so angry. It’s this idea of fantasy, a fantasy world, and my take on it is that it’s not just about the crown but this fantasy of being normal, of being liked. He sees the throne and the crown as a means to that end, to finally be respected and to finally be appreciated for all his efforts. This guy talks about when Bundy was serving as his own attorney, he had the investigating police officers on the stand, and he asked them to describe the crime scenes in detail. And it totally backfired on him, because everyone on the jury was like, “You’re sick, and you really just want to live through this again. You want to hear about it because you can’t see it for yourself.” In the second scene of Richard III, when Lady Anne says, “Behold this pattern of thy butcheries,” and shows him the dead body of Henry VI, I feel like he gets off, you know what I mean? It must so turn him on.  She’s like, “You made these holes,” and he’s like, “You’re goddamn right I did.” That connects to what he says in his first soliloquy: “I am not made for sportive tricks.” I cannot insert my penis into something, but I can insert steel and make orifices if I must. That is my substitution. That is a scary place for him to be, but I feel like he wears that as a badge of honor. You know, looking at dead Henry VI when the blood comes out again: he must just love it. And then the whole rest of the scene he’s a lothario, he’s Casanova, he’s Romeo. About the line, “Teach not thy lips such scorn, for they were made / for kissing, lady, not for such contempt,” Lois Potter said to me, “I think it’s funny that the actor playing Richard is also playing Benedick, because that sounds like a line Benedick would say, not something that Richard would say.”

Playing Richard – not only playing Richard in 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI, but playing Humphrey [Duke of Gloucester] in 1 Henry VI and 2 Henry VI was very helpful.

But they’re the opposite, it seems like.

Yes! But that’s the lesson: playing by the rules will get you killed. Trying to do things by the book, trying to show respect for your elders? No one cares about those rules, Humphrey. It starts with Humphrey and Beaufort, who hate each other, but my take is that Humphrey just loves that kid [Henry VI]. He loves that kid, it’s his brother’s kid and if his brother asked him to do anything, it was to make sure the kid is safe, to take care of him. Humphrey says he’ll do his best, but there are so many cooks in that kitchen. Once Margaret comes in and teams up with Beaufort and Buckingham and Suffolk, it’s over for him. They’re thinking: “As Lord Protector, Humphrey is the most powerful man. He needs to disappear. Then we can make some moves.” Humphrey’s own wife is like, “These people are all out to get you. What you should do is destroy all of them. Take the throne from your nephew and rule yourself.” And he says, “Don’t you ever say that to me again. What you’re talking about is treasonous. You’re talking about my nephew and yours. Don’t you ever bring that up again.” Then she gets into the whole witchcraft thing, and gets caught, and to Humphrey’s credit, when she asks if he has anything to say at her trial he says, “No. You did those things. That was your choice, and I told you not to go down that road. I implored you not to go down that road. There is nothing I can do for you.”

Then they arrest Gloucester and King Henry is like, “I wouldn’t worry about it, we’ll have the trial and then everything will turn out fine.” But Gloucester knows he will never see that child again. He tells him, “Thus is the shepherd beaten from thy side / and wolves are gnarling who shall gnaw thee first.” He tried, you know.

I think that’s why 2 Henry VI is my favorite of the Henry VI plays. 3 Henry VI has so much stuff, but I like Part Two for that moment right in the middle of the play. Once Beaufort and Gloucester die, it’s like gangster’s paradise. The old guard is gone; get in there and make your moves. Everyone’s got moves to make. Then when York comes back from Ireland with his army and his sons, what Richard has learned is: look what happened to the last Duke of Gloucester. Look where playing by the rules got him. It’s like that line in Spaceballs: “Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb.” That’s where Sarah [Fallon, who played Margaret in the tetralogy] and I always butt heads about Richard and Margaret, because she’s like, “Richard’s such an asshole,” and I’m like, “Well, I had a good teacher. You came in from France, England had to give up land to your dad just so you could come in here, no dowry, totally embarrassed us, you slept with Suffolk and when they killed him you carried his head around.” What’s the point of trying to be a good guy? Make your moves. It’s what everybody else is doing. Richard’s just so much better at it.

Margaret is pretty awful to… well, everybody, but especially Richard. Doesn’t she call him “Dicky” in 3 Henry VI?

Yeah, and her son calls him “misshapen Dick.” And then we kill him. Oh, how we kill him. Talk about some spitting in the face. Sarah Fallon did not ask for my permission when she spit in my face in 3 Henry VI. I kind of asked for it, I did stab her son in the belly right in front of her. Normally I do a little twist of the blade. One performance, right before I did the twist, I was like, “I just want to make sure you’re looking at this. Are you ready for this?” I made eye contact with her before twisting the blade and she spit in my face. I hope that was worth it, Margaret! Your son is still dead.

They are all terrible people. They just keep killing children.

Oh, come on. Margaret’s son knew what he was getting into. He was on the battlefield.

The princes in the tower? Rutland?

Yeah… yeah we killed some kids.

Let’s talk about that final soliloquy. Do you find that your Richard is redeemable?

No. No, he’s gone far too far. He even admits it when he says that line about, “I’m so far in blood that sin will pluck on sin,” you know? There’s no going back. Though I don’t think he’s redeemable, I do think he’s pitiable in a weird way, but that’s because I’m so close to it. That speech is very weird in terms of the verse – there are half lines and mid line stops, he’s all scattered, he’s so scattered. And you really see the cracks at the end of 4.4, when Shakespeare does that great thing with all those messengers coming in, and they all have something to say, and he can’t come up with an answer quite fast enough so he just punches the guy. He goes back to that beast from the Henry VI plays. A politician would know how to respond, but he sucks at that. All he knows how to do is mess people up, so he goes back to what he knows. Then there’s that part where he says, “Away towards Salisbury / while we reason here, a royal battle may be won and lost.” It’s a waste of time to try and reason these things out; let’s just go butt heads. Let’s get to the end of this. But that last speech, when all those ghosts visit him… that is why he doesn’t fall into the categories of the other serial killers we were talking about: he admits to the audience that he has a conscience. He feels bad about it.

Has he felt bad at all up until then or is it an all of a sudden thing?

I feel like once he gets that crown, it’s like trying to tread water with a weight on your ankle. He’s keeping his head above water and he’s probably smiling like everything’s fine, but underneath there’s this flurry of activity. It all culminates in that moment when he tries to sleep but realizes that Margaret’s curse has come true. Sarah [Fallon, who plays Margaret] has pointed out that whereas everyone else says that the curse has come true, Richard won’t give Margaret the credit. She says he’ll never sleep again, and “the worm of conscience still begnaw thy soul.” What I like about that word “still” is there’s an Elizabethan definition of it being “always.” I think he’s deceived himself into thinking all these crimes are justified, and it’s not till he wakes up in that scene that he realizes: “You have done some awful things, and you have had a good time doing them, but what has it got you?” That’s what I think is so sad about it. “I have my crown, but I have no friends, I have no wife.” Blunt even says he has no friends, just the people he threatens to kill if they leave him. That’s not a family. That’s not friends. His father’s dead, his mother kicked him out and essentially walked away from him, his brothers are all dead. He’s all alone. Someone asked in the Talk Back what Richard thinks is going to happen in the final battle, and my thought is, he knows he ain’t gonna win. But what is running going to get him? You can live another day, but what’s that? Another day of being miserable and having people come in and report that Richmond’s getting closer. You may as well just do this. Let’s do this. If you’re the better man then prove it. Let’s go. The FBI guy, in his book he talks about guys who hole up in a tower and shoot a bunch of people, or the post office guys who go nuts with guns, and he uses this phrase “suicide by cop.” I feel like that’s what Richard does. He’s like, “I won’t put a gun to my head, but I will make you kill me.”

Why is Richard like that?

That’s the most important thing about playing a villain like that: to find where it comes from. If you look at someone and they’re angry, it’s probably because somewhere they’re really hurt. Where did that hurt come from? At least that’s the way I look at parts; that’s what I wanted to do with Iago. If you’re going to be a bad guy with a soliloquy I feel like your job is to say, “I know on paper this is a terrible thing to do, but try to see it from my point of view.” That’s what Iago does, and Mephistopheles, and he got turned out by God. God himself says, “You are no longer welcome here. Never again.” What more is there to lose? They’re all connected in some way. I feel like that’s what’s fun about playing the “bad guy.” That’s what other people call them. I call them the heroes.

I feel like a lot of the characters in Othello think Iago is weak, so he plays that character for them. What he does is he makes everyone in the play think they’re all smarter than he is. Hamlet does the same thing. He’s so much more brilliant than anyone else on the stage, but everyone is convinced they’re a step ahead of him. He’s like, “You’ve got to be kidding me, Polonius. Come on. Really?”

How do you move on from Richard? (Editor’s note: this interview took place the day after Richard III’s final performance on April 5.)

I don’t know, you know. It was just last night.

I know. I want to do this while the wound is fresh.

I honestly cannot think of a part that’s going to be as challenging and as gratifying to do as Richard. I just can’t think of another part that’s going to be as gratifying artistically. I can’t even fathom it.

Does having done the tetralogy make the experience more intense?

That has something to do with it, but I feel like in this play Richard gets to do so much. He gets to woo the girl, he gets to play the clown, he gets to be the monster, he gets to be very sad, and he gets to have a colossal sword fight. Jeremy West, our cast member and fight choreographer, deserves a lot of kudos for that one. We did the read-through of Richard III on a Sunday night after putting up Much Ado in like, four days. We did the read-through from 6-8, and then we sent everybody home and I was said to Jeremy, “I think what we should do is start blueprinting the fight. I don’t want to wait until the end of the process.” This is the fight that ends the tetralogy, for God’s sake, so let’s do something cool.

That whole thing with me versus the three people was put together that night, and it was really funny to watch Jeremy play all three people. We put weapons around the stage and we’d do a little fight, he’d put the weapon down and run across the stage, pick up another weapon and we’d continue the fight. He did the second half of the fight later that week, during a rehearsal where he had a chunk of time where he wasn’t in any scenes and I said, “It would be great if you just finished it, and then we’ll find another time where you can teach it to us.” I had some ideas about what I wanted to do, and he took those ideas and blended them with his own. What he was most interested in is how Greg [Phelps, who played Richmond] and I are different physically. Richmond’s leaner, he’s faster, and maybe he’s smarter, even, whereas Richard is a tank who will just bash opponents. You’ll see there’s a lot of hitting with the shield. I’m the biggest dude out there and I’ve got all this muscle, so [the shield] is really a weapon, not just a defensive tool.

There’s a great moment where you bash down on Richmond’s shield over and over.

I love that moment because it’s just like, “I. Hate. You. Stay. Down. Stay. Down.” But Richmond’s not going to stay down.

It was cool having Jeremy in 3 Henry VI because there was so much fighting in that. Everybody got to talk about what they wanted to do. At one point we’re asking, “Who does Greg [playing Henry VI] have [for his fight against Edward]? Well, he’s got John [Harrell] and Allison [Glenzer]. That’s who it will be.” To their credit, both of them were like, “I’m down. Whatever you need.” The same with the ghosts. I told Jeremy I thought it would be really great to have the ghosts come in at the end of the fight – and I don’t want to make a big thing out of it, I don’t want it to be the sixth act of the play, but just a little reminder that they all said, “We will be at the battle tomorrow. We’ll be rooting for the other guy.” I just like that moment. It’s kind of like this is why you lose. You can’t have this much blood on you and still expect to get away. One of these days God’ll cut you down.

Having the ghosts come out seems like a logistical nightmare. How did you handle it?

That’s why I give the other actors all the credit, because they were all game. I was so timid that day. I was like, “I don’t know, this is just an idea.” I feel like they could have all been like, “What are you doing, I just want to get this blood off my face and be done.” But I was a fool to think they would be that way, I was a fool to doubt that they would be supportive. All I wanted to do that day is see if it was worth it. Let’s just try it and see a) if it’s possible and b) if it is possible, is it something we should do, is it something we feel good about doing? They were all like, “I think it’s cool.” We did go through a bunch of different ideas. There was talk of Richard getting tossed into their arms, all different kinds of stuff. The other problem was getting the curtains open and drums being played… I can’t even imagine what it must look like backstage during that moment. But I was really happy how everyone got behind it. Instead of them moving around and being demon-y, they just stand there like it’s a family portrait. They are all related. “We’re all members of your family, Richard, and we’ve got a space for you.” It’s one of those great ARS moments where there’s a germ of an idea, and a bunch of other smart people around who say why don’t we do this, why don’t we add that, why don’t we use the same clock chime we had going during the nightmare?

Benjamin Curns in Much Ado About Nothing. Photo by Tommy Thompson.

How does getting ready for Benedick compare to getting ready for Richard?

It’s easier. There’s way less. I memorized Richard first, and then started work on Benedick, and it’s one of those things: I always really wanted to play Benedick, but I never thought I would get to do them both in the same season. Artistic management was like, “If we did want to go that way, would you say no?” Um, hell no. I’ll sprint for the first 21 days and then I’ll relax for a bit. So that’s what they went with.

When I first started looking at Benedick I was like, “What do I have to do to make this funny?” because people expect Benedick to be funny. Then I realized that’s not the way to go about it. Figure out what you think about this guy, and make some opinions about his character and his word choices and his relationships with others, and then I bet it will be funny. Shakespeare will do that work for you. Then it was good. These plays that we put up in two days… there’s not a lot of conversation between you and the other actors. Even with Richard III, where we had more time, there was more discussion but certainly not tons and tons. I could talk forever about Richard and the Duchess of York. But you know, we just kind of went and did those scenes. Miriam [Donald Burrows, who plays the Duchess of York and Beatrice] gets it; we don’t have to keep talking about it.

Benedick is a huge part, but compared to Richard, it’s a much lighter night at the theater. It’s one of those great Shakespearean parts, Benedick is, that is not that big. It’s a ton of fun, it’s so much fun to do, audiences really get into it. I particularly like working with Chris [Johnston, who plays Claudio], and I like having Chris in bigger parts, because I like for us to figure out how to play scenes. And it’s fun to play with Miriam again. After we did The Importance of Being Earnest together, I said to her, “I really want to play Benedick and Beatrice with you.” I wasn’t sure that it would happen, but I’m sure glad that it did. That’s two of the big ones off the checklist in one season.

What’s left on the checklist?

Coriolanus. Coriolanus and Aufidius with René. René and I have done a lot of things together, but what we’ve never gotten to do is fight. I feel like the Blackfriars audience would love it. We’re the two biggest dogs in the yard, so let’s throw down. I like that play, I feel like those Roman plays speak particularly to Americans. Or they should. Coriolanus is a soldier who’s trying to make a transition to politics, like Richard, and he hates it. He hates it; he hates the people, the same way Richard and Iago do. They’re saying, “I have done so much work, and all you do is complain. It’s never good enough for you. Why don’t you pick up a sword and go out and see how freakin’ easy it is?”

I love how your performances change slightly with every show– doing a different melody for the song Benedick tries to write Beatrice in Much Ado, for example. What’s the thinking behind that?

I use this metaphor: You build a play like a skeleton, and the bone structure must remain the same. You don’t get to change the bones. The muscles, how fast the things move up and down, what you put on the skeleton can vary. Maybe it shouldn’t, but it can. I think the kinds of variations you’re talking about are the kind I’m comfortable doing – things like the song in Much Ado – because it affects nobody. Or at least, in the immediate moment it affects nobody. Once you’re out there with somebody else you have to be more careful.

You really like wrestling. What are the connections you draw between Wrestlemania and what you do at the ASC? Also, why is James Keegan the Undertaker?

He’s the General. He’s the elder of the locker room. All the guys he works with think he’s the man, and if I get to be in scenes with him, with any luck he’s going to make me look really good, and I’ll do my best to make him look really good. In the wrestling business they call it “putting someone over” when you want them to look good in front of the crowd, so you do what you can. I think that’s why even as an adult – I really should not still have an interest in this very juvenile show – I love it. It’s in front of a live audience, and so much of it is based on honest reactions from the audience. What can we do to help get the audience to go crazy for it? My brother came down to see Richard III and Much Ado, and that was one of the things he said, “It really does remind me of wrestling. You guys talk and gesture to the audience, you try to get them to boo and hiss and cheer. When you came out as king in [Richard III] you came out to music.” The night he saw it, when I finally fell over, the audience applauded, and Greg just kind of looked out to the audience. My brother said, “[Wrestling] was all I could think about, and that’s exactly what [Greg] should have done in that moment.”

My job is so all-encompassing that when I’m doing something outside of work, like watching TV, I really strive to keep it separate. I have so few things outside of work, and I try to keep them pure. Not to say that I don’t really enjoy what I do. But we are directly connected to wrestling in that we talk to the audience in the same way. We just have much better lines. And pants, which is nice.

For real: parting thoughts on Richard?

I’ll miss him. It’ll be sad. Not only is it sad to not do it, it’s sad not to have it to look forward to. It’s not waiting in the wings anymore. René said at a Talk Back that now that we’ve finished the history cycle, we just want to start over. Just do it again. That’d be great – if you want to do Richard II in the fall, I’m in. I want to play Bolingbroke.

-- Lia Razak

Friday the 13th!

The idea of “Friday the 13^th being bad luck” didn’t start until the nineteenth century, but anachronisms have never stopped anybody from drawing comparisons to Shakespeare. And so, in honor of this prestigiously spooky date, I’d like to talk to you about bad luck in Shakespeare. By which, I mean, I want to talk about the Scottish Play – or, properly, Macbeth.

            Now, I think the superstition about the supposed curse of The Scottish Play is a whole bunch of hooey. Think about it: if (as our actors will point out if you ask them about the "curse") you have a play with that many swordfights in performance for over 400 years, by everyone from professional theater troupes to kindergarten classes, you’re going to have some incidents. Compound that with the general human fascination with superstition, and what do you get? In this case: destruction, mayhem, and death.

            So where did the idea of the curse come from in the first place? Well, it has been said that Shakespeare wrote Macbeth as a nod to his new patron, King James I, who wrote a book on demonology and had a fascination with witchcraft and wizardry. The legend goes that Shakespeare, in his zeal to impress, lifted the incantations of his witches from books of actual black magic – which means that actors playing the witches are forever casting real spells. To lend credence to that story, bad things reportedly started happening from the very first performance. A story attributed to John Aubrey, who claimed to know some actors who worked with Shakespeare, and relayed in Richard Huggett’s The Curse of Macbeth, claims the boy playing Lady Macbeth was struck with a fever and died before the performance, forcing Shakespeare himself to step into the role.

            Things got worse and worse. Allegedly, in a 1672 production, the actor playing Macbeth used a real dagger against the actor playing Duncan and actually murdered him. In 1849, the appearance of British actor William Charles Macready in a New York production of Macbeth incited a riot that killed 23 people and wounded 36 more. In the 1942 John Gielgud production, three actors died during rehearsal – two of the witches and Duncan – and the costume and set designers both committed suicide. Even the great Shakespearean Laurence Olivier fell prey to the curse: performing Macbeth at the Old Vic in 1937, he was almost killed when a stage light crashed to the ground only inches from him. His director and his Lady Macbeth both got in a car crash, the founder of the theater died from a heart attack on opening night, and an audience member, hit by a fragment of Olivier’s sword during one performance, also suffered a heart attack and died.

            Perhaps the play is cursed. Regardless, I think the key to understanding the Macbeth mystery lies with the witches. They may not be casting real spells, but they tell us something very important about fate, free will, and luck (good or bad). In 1.3, one of the weird sisters recounts the tale of a sailor’s wife who wouldn’t share her nuts. In retaliation, the witch calls a storm upon the seas where her husband is sailing, and says: “Though his bark cannot be lost / Yet it shall be tempest tossed” (1.3.24-5).

            The witches don’t demonstrate any real power – not in real life and not in the play. They can’t make things happen. They can only set up situations and circumstances in which things could happen. They can’t sink the sailor’s ship, but they can make the waters very rough, and if the sailor’s crew isn’t sure-footed, strong, and prepared, then that ship is going down. Shakespeare can’t curse us with his Scottish Play from beyond the grave, but he can certainly write a script with witches, murders, ghosts and swordfights, and make the language and characters so beautiful and compelling that we simply have to perform it over and over and over again – increasing the probability of accidents, destruction, mayhem, and even death.

            Yet, all that coil is long of us. We can’t blame supernatural elements for the most basic of human errors, whatever the temptation to avoid agency.

Coming soon: the fourth installment of "Better Know an Actor" with Ben Curns!

--Lia Razak

Better Know an Actor: Sarah Fallon

Welcome to the third installment of "Better Know an Actor." This time we talk with the lovely Sarah Fallon.

Sarah Fallon as Arethusa in Philaster, or Love Lies a Bleeding.
Photo by Tommy Thompson.

What’s your name, and who do you play this season? (Editors’ note: The 2012 Actors’ Renaissance Season has closed.)

Sarah Fallon: My name is Sarah Fallon. Let’s start with the beginning: I play Conrad and Ursula in Much Ado about Nothing, I play Margaret, Prince Edward, and a citizen in Richard III, I play Arethusa in Philaster, I play the footman who has no name (he’s just Mr. Footman) in A Mad World, my Masters, and I play Dido in Dido, Queen of Carthage.

How did you get to where you are in your career right now? What advice do you have for any actors just starting out?

SF: I suppose I’ve had a dramatic flair ever since I was a child, and I started out doing summer theater classes – not like the program we have here, but through a Rec center or something like that, you know, where we would put on some cheesy production. I enjoyed doing those. Then…I had been doing theater in high school and I really enjoyed that. In fact, I played the violin in junior high school, and then I had to give it up because I couldn’t do that and theater because it conflicted, time-wise. And I also didn’t really care for my orchestra teacher, who was the same in junior high and high school. So I thought, “Alright, I’m going to leave orchestra behind and I’m going to do theater.”

My high school theater teacher had a lot of faith in me that I didn’t have, and every year he usually wrote the show we would perform for 2^nd graders. One year, it was called, “The Wicked Witch of Dragon’s Lair Mountain.” He held auditions. I wanted to play the princess or the queen; because I mean who else do you want to play? And he cast me as the wicked witch. I was so upset, because I did not want to play the wicked witch! I went in and talked to him and asked, “Why did you cast me as the wicked witch? I can’t even cackle! I don’t know how to cackle!” And he said, “Sarah, you did the best in the audition, and you can cackle. I know you can do this. And it’s the best part.” I soon realized that it was the best part, and that often the queens and the princesses were quite dull, actually. The wicked witch was the most exciting part in this play.

When I went to college I was pre-med for two and a half years, and I was minoring in theater. I was auditioning for the university productions, and getting cast in them, and loving that, and hating my biology and chemistry classes. And not doing well in them. So my junior year, I decided to bite the bullet and switch majors. I decided that I would have a life where I was passionate about what I did instead of passionate about making money. So I switched my major after the fall semester of my junior year, and just went theater-heavy for the rest of it, and loved it. Then I auditioned for grad schools and went to a grad school that was specifically for Classical training. So we didn’t do any modern plays. It was all about doing Shaw and Ibsen and Chekhov and Shakespeare. That’s all you were getting trained for. On top of that, I was not getting trained to be a teacher. I was not getting trained to be a film or TV star. I was getting trained to be a theater practitioner who worked on classical text. So that helped me a lot. I was also working at Colorado Shakespeare Festival in the summers, and getting cast really well there. It’s just a matter of finding what it is you’re passionate about doing and following through with that, and working as hard as you can on it. That’s what I’ve done.

I was lucky enough to find this place [the ASC] pretty early in my career. I graduated from grad school in 2003, and my first season here was in 2004. I was living in New York, and I auditioned for them there, and they cast me and said, “Hey, do you want to play Portia in Merchant of Venice, and Helena in Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Madame Tourvel in Les liaisons dangereuses and I was like “Uh, yes?” Who would say no to those? I was freshly out of grad school and being cast in this professional theater that ran year-round (which was also different from the summer festivals I had been doing), so I said absolutely. Yes. Sign me up. And it was such a good fit, I think, both for them and for me which is why I keep coming back. I have had some breaks from here, but most of my professional career up until this point has been here.

The grad school program you attended was at the University of Delaware, correct? What productions did you do while you were there?

SF: I played St. Joan in Shaw’s St. Joan, which was amazing. I played Candida in Shaw’s Candida. I did some heavy Shaw while I was there, which was great. I played Rosaline in Love’s Labour’s Lost. That was a really fun production. We did get to do one of the more sort of modern-ish plays, called Translations. We had to learn Irish dialects for that, which was a nice fun challenge, and I got to play Bridget. Bridget was not really the leading lady, she was a little bit more of the comic sidekick, and that was a fun thing to do, too. It’s one of the things I like about being here, because it’s so much fun to branch out. While there are the things that you do well, and that you will continue to do well, and will continue to be cast as, you still get to play the sassy sidekick, and Conrad, or, you know, the dude. You get to do that a lot more here than you do at other theaters. I went a long time before I got to play an ingénue. I thought, “I can bring a lot of strength to these ingénues. I think I get them.” But people saw me and heard me and they initially thought leading lady. Then after they’ve worked with me for a little bit they think, “Let’s see what she does with Ophelia. Let’s see how she plays Desdemona.” I’ve played a lot of the biggies. There are still some biggies that I haven’t played but that I want to play.

What are those?

SF: Cleopatra. But I’ve got time for that. Lady Macbeth. I’ve never played Lady Macbeth.

You would do an awesome Lady Macbeth.

SF: It’s funny because Lady Macbeth has the reputation, and everybody wants to play her, but actually I think Margaret is way cooler. She has a lot more of the power that Lady Macbeth doesn’t have. I think she’s one of the most overlooked characters in the canon, because she shows up in the Henry VI plays, and by the time you get to Richard III she only has two scenes. Most people don’t know her history and they don’t know what she gets to do in parts two and three of Henry VI. It’s way more exciting than Lady M. So the fact that I’ve actually gotten to do Margaret is pretty exciting, but I would love to do Lady Macbeth at some point. Non-Shakespeare, I’d really like to play Hedda Gabler [in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler]. Miss Julie, in [August Strindberg’s] Miss Julie, would be great. Also, Imogen. I’ve never been in Cymbeline, and she’s one of the pants roles I haven’t played yet, so I would really enjoy a crack at that.

Sarah Fallon  in Henry VI, Part 3, 2011.  Photo by Tommy Thompson.

For the last four years, the Actors’ Renaissance Season has been performing a tetralogy that ends this year with Richard III. You’ve done all three Henry VI plays, with much of the same cast throughout, and you played Margaret from beginning to end. I’ve had the great good fortune to see all of those productions through the archives, and many ASC fans have seen them all live over the past four years, and we all agree that it’s been an absolute pleasure to watch your Margaret. When you signed on in 1 Henry VI, did you know you would be here to finish the cycle?

SF: Nope. I didn’t. I mean, you hope, but I did not know. I hadn’t read any of the Henry VI plays before I started them. I was playing other roles in 1 Henry VI  that were bigger than the Margaret scene. You only get the one scene [in part one], and it’s so different from the Margaret you see in two and three. It’s like a romantic comedy shows up in 1 Henry VI between Suffolk and Margaret. It’s funny: we share asides, and it’s very light-hearted and warm. Then you come to part two, and she’s walking around with [Suffolk’s] head, and then part three, where she’s trying to save her son’s life and has to watch her son die.

She also kills a little boy.

SF: Yeah. It’s a huge journey. I had no idea I would be able to play them all through. I think a lot of times, Margaret in Richard III is cast as older – you know, older than I am. Here, it made perfect sense to put me in it to complete the tetralogy (also, we don’t have a lot of older actors, as far as actual years of age). So it made a lot of sense for me to play it, but I think if we had been doing this production without the other Henry VI plays before it, I wouldn’t necessarily have been cast as Margaret. So I feel very lucky that I was able to continue every year and do that, but I had no idea. You have no idea from one year to the next whether they’re going to hire you back.

I love what you did with Margaret. She’s not old, she’s not a hag, she’s just spent. The white hair and the dark eyes are clearly not years of age, but years of torment. How did you come up with that?

SF: I wanted her to look haggard, not because she’s withered and old but because she has suffered. It’s the shock of grief. And that happens to people: their hair goes white in streaks sometimes when they go through an amazing amount of grief. That’s where I was coming from. She’s not sleeping, she’s not eating, she’s lost everything, and it’s having a physical affect on her appearance.

How does it feel to end it?

SF: Bittersweet. It was wonderful. I feel very privileged, I feel very lucky, but it’s bittersweet, because it’s over. We’ve done them all. I want to do them all again!

They’re at the archives! You can watch them!

SF: I have yet to see an archival tape, and I don’t know if I want to. [Laughs] I know we can’t do this here – it wouldn’t get enough draw – but I would have loved to do all these plays in one season, so that you could see them back to back to back over a weekend. You could see all of the parts together. It would be amazing. Exhausting, too, and financially imprudent, since you have to have some big name titles in there that will draw people in, and the Henry VI plays are not that. But that would be another experience I would love, to do them all at the same time.

I really wish people knew what they were missing, and that theaters could do that and have it be successful. Does it ever work?

SF: A lot of the time those plays get conflated. They’ll say “Oh yeah, you can see Henry VI parts one, two, and three because we’ve put them all together.” But they’re such different plays, and you end up cutting a lot – a lot of people cut all the Jack Cade stuff [in 2 Henry VI], but when you cut the rebellion, you lose the story. I understand why people do that, so you can get a flavor of the plays, but you won’t get the experience of all three plays if you turn them into one. It’s doing something that Shakespeare knew he couldn’t do. He wrote King Lear in one piece. He wrote Henry V in one piece. He wrote Henry IV in two parts, and Henry VI in three parts, because he knew he couldn’t get that entire story out in one play. I’m a firm believer that if he could have done it, he would have. There are plenty of plays he wrote in one installment. I think that he broke these up for a reason.

Sarah Fallon in Doctor Faustus, 2010.  Photo by Tommy Thompson.

You play another incredible lady this season: Dido, in Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage. How do you play her over and over with that level of intensity without wanting to kill yourself when you go home?

SF: It’s pretty easy. I mean, it’s so much fun to play her. It’s exhausting, I’m sweating at the end of it, I’m vocally and emotionally drained, but the fact that you are just playing a part and you get to let that go is very exciting. I love getting to go on that journey. A lot of the reason I love doing what I do is because you get to pretend you’re in situations that you’ll never – hopefully – actually be in. Hopefully I don’t ever feel the need to throw myself onto a fire. But you get to put yourself in these situations. And they’re queens! I mean, I’m never going to be queen – but what would it feel like? And I do get to be her. I get to be her for two hours once a week or so. It’s an amazing opportunity. So I don’t feel the need to kill myself at all at the end of it, in real life, because I’ve already pretended to do it onstage. It’s quite cathartic to be able to do that for your job.

For people who aren’t actors, it’s hard to understand how you can raise that much emotion on command – especially actual physical reactions, like crying or blushing or losing all the color in your face. You have to feel all the emotions – how do you do that so convincingly? Is there a trick?

SF: No, it’s really about being present in the moment for me, and believing that this is happening to this character in this moment. If you’re really present in the moment, it’s not hard to come up with the emotion that you would feel if someone that you loved more than anything and wanted to hold onto more than anything walked away from you. You’ve put everything out on the table, you’ve given him everything, whether you’re under a spell from the gods or not – which she is but she doesn’t know she is. So for her it’s very real. It’s not something that’s fake. If you’re present in the story in that moment, it kind of just comes. It’s there. And, you know, this ain’t my first rodeo. I’ve been doing roles and this thing for a long time. There are places that you go to in your emotional well, things that you can draw on if you need to from your own life. I’m not a person who needs to go back to my own heartbreak or whatever, but that’s always there.

You’ve got some great roles this season. Which is your favorite?

SF: Dido.

More than Margaret?

SF: Yeah. Margaret is great, but she only gets the two scenes. They’re great scenes; I love playing them; certainly rounding out the whole journey of Margaret is intense and amazing. But it’s not Margaret’s play. It’s Richard’s play. And it should be. I don’t want to make it Margaret’s play, and it would be hard to even if I wanted to, because she only has two scenes. But Dido really gets the stage time; she gets to throw herself onto a fire at the end. You get a little bit of everything. She gets to be in love, she gets to be under the gods’ spell, she gets to be heartbroken, and she gets to commit suicide. There’s a lot to do in the span of about an hour and forty five minutes.

How about Conrad, in Much Ado about Nothing? You do get to call John Harrell an ass, really loudly, on stage.

SF: I never thought about Conrad until I was playing him, because it’s Conrad, right? And you go "yeah, okay, that’s fine." But he really gets the short end of the stick. I was realizing when I was playing him, “Hey guys, um, I didn’t do anything wrong.” Later I do call the constable an ass, but initially, I was not part of the plan. I’m privy to it, so I guess I’m sort of an accomplice, but I wasn’t there when it happened. I’m only listening to Borachio tell the story about it. I wasn’t there. I didn’t have any part in the machinations. I didn’t receive any money for anything. I’m just a friend who’s listening to a story about what [Borachio] did on this drunken night, and I get roped in and get arrested. That’s awful.

I never thought of it that way.

SF: I didn’t either, until I played it! But Conrad hasn’t really done anything wrong. And you can’t really go to prison for the rest of your life for calling a guy an ass. It’s not a good thing to do to a man of the law, but he is an ass. And it takes a while for [Conrad] to do that. It’s actually the last thing he says in the play. In the next scene, where Borachio admits that he’s done everything, Conrad doesn’t have a word to say. I’m just standing there in cuffs. I don’t say anything. I don’t know if he’s chosen to invoke his right of not speaking because he’s waiting for his lawyer (because he really hasn’t done anything) or what. I didn’t realize how innocent he was in all of this until I played him. I was like, “Why am I here in cuffs? Could somebody please let me go?”

What was your best “Cowboy Up and Get ‘er Done” moment?

SF: I knew that was coming. So, in 2008, I was playing Isabella in Measure for Measure. After rehearsal, and I went and grabbed some dinner from Hardee’s. I’d never been to Hardee’s before, since we don’t have Hardee’s in Texas, which is where I’m from. I’d heard a horror story from a past boyfriend in college who had gotten food poisoning from Hardee’s and had actually sued them and made some money off of it. Anyway, so I went and grabbed Hardee’s, then went and finished rehearsal. At 2:00 in the morning I start projectile vomiting. I have food poisoning. I had never had food poisoning before, ever, but I was like “Yup, this is what food poisoning is. This is terrible.”

So I’m projectile vomiting all night long, and we’ve got rehearsal the next day and then we have the preview, so we’re going to have an audience. I am miserable. I can’t even keep down water or chewing gum – the juices from the gum going down my throat are making me vomit. So I couldn’t do anything. I had a costume fitting first, before rehearsal, and Allison, my friend, said, “Just have a sip of water. You look terrible. You’re white. No, you’re green. You’re green right now.” And I’m like, “I am not doing well.” Isabella’s not a small part, you know. I took a sip of water, I go in for my costume fitting, and I feel that the water’s about to come up again. So I say, “I’m sorry, I need just a moment,” and I went into bathroom, puked, went right back, stood there for my costume fitting, finished my fitting, went to rehearsal, said “Patrick [Tucker, our director], if you could just get through the scenes that I’m in first so I can go home early that would be great, because I really need to lie down before the show tonight.”

I stopped ingesting everything – even water – because I knew I would puke if I did, and I went home and lay down for a few hours before I had to be back. I felt horrible. The color of my skin matched my white novice outfit that I was wearing as [Isabella]. I did the performance. I even set up trashcans backstage, just in case. I didn’t need to use them, thank god, but I was feeling rough. That was probably the worst I’ve ever felt. I got through the performance, I don’t know how, and finally felt okay enough to have a sip of water and maybe not throw it back up, so that was good, but I just stopped ingesting everything for about eight hours before I had to be onstage.

That seems really dangerous. Did you consider medical attention?

SF: No – there’s nothing you can do about food poisoning, really, you just have to let it run its course. And most of the time if it is indeed food poisoning you’re going to be done within 12-24 hours, and I was, by the time the show ended I was coming out of it. So yeah, that’s my biggest "cowboy up" moment.

I wonder how you could have incorporated projectile vomiting into Measure for Measure.

SF: I thought about that! I thought it would be great, if I did have to vomit, to throw up on Angelo when he says, “Hey Isabella, sleep with me or I’m going to kill your brother.” BLARGH! That would be amazing. If there’s going to be a moment where I vomit onstage, that would be it.

Who was your Angelo?

Gregory Jon Phelps as Philaster and Sarah Fallon as Arethusa in 
Philaster, or Love Lies a Bleeding. Photo by Tommy Thompson.

SF: René Thornton, Jr.

Dude, that is hard core.

SF: The show must go on.

Speaking of René, let’s pretend for a moment that this is a Cosmo interview as opposed to a scholarly discussion about Shakespearean theater. You get to make out with everybody! What’s that like?

SF: I do. I know. It’s true. It’s pretty great. I do get to make out with a lot of the hot guys here. It’s a perk. Kissing Greg, kissing René… Greg and René are my biggies. René and I have been kissing for so long… we call each other stage-husband and stage-wife for a reason. Because it’s the job, there’s nothing sexy about it; but we have to sell sexy, so there’s a part of it that needs to be passionate. But it is very professional, you know. Like: I know Greg’s girlfriend, and he knows my future husband – it’s not ever weird like that. They are not unattractive guys, though.

So, zombies. What are you going to do about the inevitable zombie apocalypse?

SF: Well, there are so many contingency plans. It depends on what is happening. If I had the time, I would get in my car and get away from here. If the zombie apocalypse happened here, and I found out it was on my doorstep and I had time to get away, I would get away. I have a friend who has a property in Oklahoma that’s out in the middle of nowhere, and he has tons of ammunition and guns. It would be easier to fortify. If I could get there, that would be great. If not, I’d probably hole up in the actor house, if I didn’t have the time to get away. There are a couple of entrances you’d have to block off, and there are some windows and things, but zombies aren’t good at climbing steps. They’re not good at climbing, really, so it would be a little harder for them to get to the front door. And I have provisions over there which is pretty nice so we’d be able to survive for a bit there. But it depends on so many things: Did I find out about because it’s somewhere else, like DC? Do I have time to get away? Do I have time to get to my fiancé? My fiancé says he’s coming to me, and I should not try to get to England. He will come to me… He’ll kill the zombies. He’s quite prepared for this. He doesn’t ever go anywhere without his knife and his EDC.

What’s an EDC?

SF: “Every Day Carry.”

I don’t know what that means.

SF: For him, it’s this zippered wallet thing that has his most essential things in it. So it’s got like pieces of rope, nylon tie string, USB sticks, all of his passports, money, things like that. If the only thing you can carry with you is that, then he would have that. So it’s got basic stuff, stuff that will help him survive. It’s got his knife, too, all in this handy little carrier thing that he’s never without.

That’s a little weird, but I’m on his side when the zombies come.

SF: He’s very prepared. I’ve chosen well.

You’re getting married 20 days after the Renaissance season ends. That is insane.

SF: It is insane. You know who else is doing that? Brandi Rhome. Her wedding date is the exact same date as mine. Isn’t that crazy?

Whoa – who set it first?

SF: Probably her. She’s better prepared with those things. I don’t know; I’m not sure who came first. I just thought it was funny: “You’re crazy like me, too? You’re planning a wedding 20 days after the season ends?”

But this is her first ARS, so to be fair –

SF: She didn’t know what she was getting into.

What’s the best “prithee” moment you’ve been involved in?

SF: In 1 Henry VI, in the Suffolk-Margaret scene we were speaking of earlier, I’m standing there with Greg, and Greg loses his line. So he says, “prithee” and the prompter says “She is beautiful” and Greg goes, “She is beautiful!” Which was great.

In the very first ARS in 2005, I was here. Those were the lovely days when we only did three shows in the ARS, and we had a week and a half of rehearsals. So luxurious! At the time it seemed nuts, but now it’s like, “Wow, we had so much time.” The second play we opened was Tamer Tamed. John Harrell had the very first line of the play. He’s on stage with a couple other guys and they come out of the trap to start the play. So John comes out of the trap, looks around, and just goes, “Prithee!” really loudly. First line of the show. A lot of people have accused him of doing it on purpose, because it was the first time we had done anything like this, and the idea, as an actor, of going out there and calling “prithee”? I obviously do not want to do it. It’s nice to have the prompter there if you need it, but as an actor I want to be out there and know my lines. I don’t want to be out there with my ass hanging in the wind and not know what I’m going to say next. So people say, “You were just trying to break the ice, John, to show what we’re doing and how it works.” But he says, “No, I actually couldn’t remember the first line of the play.” That was another good one. If you can use it to your advantage, like “She is beautiful!” the audience laughs, and they will remember that they were there for this great “prithee” moment.

Another one I wasn’t here for but I hear about all the time was another ARS when we were doing Volpone. John Harrell was playing Volpone – another John Harrell prithee story – and it was towards the end of the play that he calls “prithee” and the prompter says, “I am Volpone.” Because that was the line that John went up on. So he says, “I am Volpone, and will be again tomorrow night!”

Wow. So, how do you deal with being so awesome on a daily basis?

SF: [Laughs] I don’t think of myself as awesome on a daily basis. I just try to be me on a daily basis and hope that that’s awesome.

--Lia Razak

Farewell, Richard.

Benjamin Curns in Henry VI, Part 3, 2011. 
 Photo by Tommy Thompson.

The third installment of “Better Know an Actor” is coming soon, in which I talk with the lovely Sarah Fallon about Margaret, Dido, and zombies. But before that, as the 2012 Actors’ Renaissance Season is coming to a close this week, I’d like to reflect a little bit on the production that changed my life: Richard III. The final show is this Thursday night, April 5, at the Blackfriars Playhouse.

            This show is kind of a big deal. It completes the tetralogy the ASC started in 2009. They staged all three parts of Henry VI, with much of the same cast reprising their roles throughout and doing some interesting doubling. Ben Curns, our believed hunchbacked Richard, played the good-hearted Humphrey in the Henry VI plays until that character dies a sad and innocent death. The next time we see him, it's as Richard, son of the Duke of York. The change is dramatic, startling, and beautiful; just one of the many things that makes the ASC and the ARS unique. We also got to follow Allison Glenzer as Lady Grey and eventual Queen of England, John Harrell as Edward IV, and Sarah Fallon as the vicious, visceral Margaret. If you saw all four plays, you know that this tetralogy has been something special, and the ending is bittersweet.

            If you didn’t see all those plays, however, you can still thoroughly enjoy this season’s production of Richard III. It is, in my mind, the definitive interpretation of Shakespeare’s play. The smooth and streamlined script, cut by Curns himself, keeps the action going apace without losing any of the moral ambiguity. The poetry is beautiful, without falling into some Marlovian quagmire of repetitive iambic pentameter droning. The actors’ understanding of the story translates immediately to the audience: you catch every word, and parts of the play that might have seemed opaque in other productions or on the page become vividly, transparently understandable.

Richard III opened soon after I first arrived in Staunton for my ASC internship. After seeing it for the first time, I excitedly called my parents to gush over “how great it was you guys oh my god you guys so good.” (Enthusiasm can render me somewhat ineloquent). They, partly convinced I was wasting my life as an unpaid intern at some (in their minds) random Shakespeare festival in Nowheresville, Virginia, decided to come down and see what was so special about this play for themselves. They’ve seen and read Richard III and are generally familiar with Shakespeare, but not so much with the Blackfriars Playhouse or our original staging conditions. It was new for them, and they were clearly basing their opinions on my life choices on their thoughts of this one production. It was risky for me. What if they didn’t like it?

            I’m just kidding. That thought never crossed my mind. I was a giddy mess throughout their whole visit because I was so excited to share this Richard III with the people I love. It’s one of those things: like a joke you just learned that you really want to tell everybody, but it’s so funny you can’t stop laughing long enough to get the words out. You can see (though that awareness never distracts from the production itself) just how brilliant, innovative, and hardworking every single member of the company must be. The whole play screams, “This is a well-oiled machine!” Actors create standout performances when the play calls for them to do so – Aidan O’Reilly, as Clarence, delivers his dream speech so compellingly that it gives me tunnel vision, and Rene Thornton, Jr. raises one hell of a holy descant as Buckingham – and return to the background when necessary as easily as fitting the pieces together in a twelve-piece puzzle. But, ultimately, it is Richard’s play. And that’s where Ben Curns comes in.

            I would like to point out that it is absolutely mind-boggling that Curns is playing both Richard and Benedick (in Much Ado about Nothing) this season. Sometimes he’d do a matinee of Much Ado, then an evening performance of Richard III, and be brilliant in both. He's either exceptionally talented or dangerously schizophrenic, but whatever, it works. His Benedick is lovely: funny, witty, sympathetic, and deep. But his Richard is something else.

Allison Glenzer as Queen Elizabeth and Benjamin Curns as Richard in Richard III.
Photo by Tommy Thompson

            As an ASC intern, I am in the enviable position of being able to see as many of the productions as my little theater-loving heart can handle. I have seen Richard III five or six times, from every vantage point in the Blackfriars Playhouse: gallant stool, front row center, both sides of the balcony, the back row of the first level. While watching things over and over is not new for me (I think I watched The Dark Knight every day for a year when it came out on DVD), theater is obviously different from film, and I hungrily devour the nuanced performances that change, slightly, every night. The plot doesn’t change, and the overarching design of the characters stands firm, but the actors tweak words, drop gestures, stress different syllables. Every member of the company does it, but Curns is a master. He lives Richard in every single moment. He is never taking on an assumed identity, never playing at Richard but actually going on this journey with us every single night. The Blackfriars Playhouse prides itself on the audience contact that comes out of using Shakespeare’s original staging conditions, so as the audience changes with each performance, so does Richard. If we have found Richard’s successful wooing of Lady Anne to be both creepy and funny, he singsongs his, “But I will not keep her long!” to keep us there with him. If we have found it disgusting, he drops his voice and lands each syllable. Curns is extremely adept at gauging his audience – probably because he’s made the audience the most important part of his performance.

            His Richard has no private persona. He has two public faces: the one he puts on for the other characters in the play and the one he puts on for us. He is a showman who needs and craves and loves his audience. In the famous opening speech, Curns triumphantly proclaims to other cast members onstage that “now is the winter of our discontent / made glorious summer by this son of York” as he sends them off one by one, with applause and accolades. But when they are gone, he switches, and turns to us. From that moment on, we are his only constant ally. He seeks our approval, revels in our disgust, and soaks up any admiration we manage to muster. Curns speaks to us conspiratorially, as if we are in on Richard’s plot, or some integral part of it, though we remain constantly aware that what he is doing is repugnant to us.

In the Richard III Actor-Scholar council, Curns talks about prepping for Richard by studying serial killers and thinking about Richard’s relationship to his parents: his father, constantly telling him that he is special and destined to be great, and his mother, constantly cursing his birth and him. That mixture of overwhelming superiority and crushing inferiority turn Richard into this strangely relatable monster who unconsciously believes that becoming king will fix all of his problems, both physical and emotional. And when he does finally take the crown, the moment is epic: the band strikes up some bragging, brassy trumpets, and Richard enters bedecked in the richest form of every single status signifier there is  – crown, scepter, cape – and approaches the throne he touched so longingly at the end of 3 Henry VI. Richard climbs into it with the help of Buckingham and then turns to us: “Thus high, by thy advice / And thy assistance, is King Richard seated!” He draws out the last three words triumphantly as he sits, there is a moment of silence and then, fidgeting, Richard realizes (as we do) that the chair has changed nothing, that he is still a lump of foul deformity, that his mother still hates him and his father is still dead.

Nowhere is this pitiful complexity more evident, of course, than in Richard’s final soliloquy. It’s strange on the page and often jarringly out of character on the stage, but not this time. Firstly, Curns’s Richard has known this is coming, because he’s already known that he is doing and has done terrible things and that ultimately there will be consequences. Sixthly, as throughout the play, Richard is talking to us and not to himself. Third and lastly, he is asking for our forgiveness as well as his own and, most nights, we don’t give it to him. To conclude: he has to pay.

I feel sorry for him. I can’t help it. He says, “All several sins, all used in each degree / Throng to the bar, crying all…” and he stops, his eyes go wide as if he can see not only the ghosts of those he has murdered, but also the corporeal form of all the pain he’s caused. Half out of remorse, but half out of fear of what will come when he is finally slain and goes, like Clarence in his dream, to the reckoning, he croaks out: “guilty.”

Oh, and my parents loved it.

--Lia Razak