Review: Michael Urie in a Clear and Queer Richard II Off-Broadway

Few moments feel as electric as when a Shakespeare scene lands as clear as day. Those complicated family trees don’t matter when there’s such rich specificity in how the actors interact. All that early modern poetry? You don’t have to worry about it when every iamb lands with contemporary glister.

Such an event occurs in Craig Baldwin’s 1980s resetting of Richard II for Red Bull Theater, in the play’s pivotal deposition scene. Richard (Michael Urie) hems and haws before handing over the crown to Bolingbroke (Grantham Coleman). The suspense generated during Urie and Coleman’s standoff with words as their only weapons is even more tense than a bout of pistol roulette earlier on.

Urie, fresh off a stint in Oh, Mary!, is an inveterate physical comedian, and he integrates gesture into almost every line reading, guiding us through the emotional beats of language without distracting from it. Coleman, who delivered a crystalline Benedick in the Delacorte’s 2019 Much Ado About Nothing, may be delivering the most accessible Shakespearean verse of anyone working these days. He’s the kind of actor who sends you rushing to the nearest Folger edition to check if the language could really be that straightforward.

There’s something deeply relatable about Urie’s dopey protagonist with his hangdog pout. Nobody asked this guy if he wanted to run a country and head an army. Richard’s heartbreaking flashes of decisiveness, when Richard fleetingly considers actually fighting back rather than capitulating, reveal how unready for wartime leadership this man, who just happened to inherit a throne, really is.

He’s also, in Baldwin’s conception, queer, making out with his cousin, the Duke of Aumerle (David Mattar Merten), at the club while his queen (Lux Pascal) dissociates on the dance floor next to them. It’s not a new idea: a Royal Shakespeare Company production a decade ago also positioned Aumerle as Richard’s lover, also combining him with another critical character late in the play as Baldwin does here.

In trying to make things accessible, Baldwin sometimes introduces some new fogginess. Don’t think too literally about how this plot could make any sense at all in 1980s Manhattan. What kingdom called England is Richard ruling over exactly? Framing the entire play as a flashback recalled by Richard from his imprisonment in the Tower (of Trump?) can make things more complicated than they need to be, too. Since Urie never leaves the stage, it’s sometimes hard to tell if he’s actually present in scenes or just observing from the future.

And while it’s fun to imagine a medieval king surrounded by his gay posse, there’s something a little unfinished here about locating all the queerness on one side of the battle for the throne. Richard prefers to spend his days steaming at the bathhouse or doing lines of coke while Eurythmics songs blare at the nightclub rather than ruling. Bolingbroke, in contrast, is all business and seemingly all straight. As Prince Faggot asks, why can’t queer royals reign well, too? Since the text doesn’t have anything concrete to say about this, the ties between Richard’s ineffectiveness and his queerness aren’t grounded in any context for how a monarch with a wife and a boyfriend might be received in this fantasy English American kingdom.

Still, Baldwin’s staging is as fast-paced and precise as Urie’s and Grantham’s language. The only element of Arnulfo Maldonado’s set is a glass box that transforms from prison cell to royal platform under Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew’s lighting, an LED playground that keeps the drama quotient high. There’s some unevenness in the supporting ensemble, but there are especially boldly drawn portrayals from Ron Canada’s scathing John of Gaunt and Kathryn Meisle’s ambivalent York (a Duke turned Duchess in this production).

“Everybody’s looking for something,” Aumerle keeps singing, haunting the king’s sweet dreams. Richard’s something is freedom, an escape from the weight of the crown that he never finds, even in surrendering it. But if you’re on the lookout for something as simple as a Shakespeare production that feels fresh and stirring, this play’s the thing.