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.”
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| Benjamin Curns in 3 Henry VI. Photo by Tommy Thompson. |
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.
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| Allison Glenzer and Benjamin Curns in Richard III. Photo by Tommy Thompson. |
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
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. |
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
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