The New Yorker Radio Hour - Podcast Extra: André Holland on Shakespeare’s “Richard II”

Episode Date: July 23, 2020

This summer, the Public Theatre, in New York, is putting on Shakespeare’s history play “Richard II.” Because most theatre was cancelled, even outdoors, due to the pandemic, the Public partnered with WNYC to bring the show to the radio. The production stars André Holland as the weak, indecisive king who faces a rebellion by his cousin, Bolingbroke. Richard is not a “bad dude,” Holland says, but a man doing the best he can in a situation he cannot manage. The theatre critic Vinson Cunningham spoke with Holland about performing Shakespeare as a Black actor and his concerns about taking on the role of King Richard: What would a Black man playing the failed leader convey to an audience? Holland also explains why he thinks that Black actors are particularly suited to inhabiting the language of Shakespeare.   New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

I'm David Remnick, and this is a special episode of our podcast. This summer, the public theater in New York is putting on Shakespeare's play, Richard the Second. Now, normally, of course, they'd be doing it for free in Central Park, but it was canceled. So Richard the second is happening instead on the radio and on podcast in four episodes. The New Yorker's theater critic, Vincent Cunningham, hosts the event, and you don't have to stand in line for eight hours in the sun to get tickets. Richard the second is about a weak, indecisive king, who loses

control and faces a rebellion by his cousin. Andre Holland plays Richard, and he talk with Vincent Cunningham. As the host of this radio production, I interviewed a number of the principal actors in the show, and I was especially excited to talk to Andre Holland. You might remember him from the great movie Moonlight, and he was also the lead in a movie I loved so much called High Flying Bird. He's a wonderful presence on screen, a wonderful voice. And the casting of this production was really unusual.

Most of the principal actors are black people and people of color, and this was all decided well before we knew that it couldn't happen in the Delacourt Theater and instead would have to happen on radio. And so much of the complication, much of the challenge of making the production was having the sort of color consciousness that is so much a part of the public's mission often with Shakespeare and making it come across in terms of sounds instead of sights. So one of the things that Andre and I talked about a lot is performing Shakespeare as a black actor. It really spoke to me, man. The language really moved me, and it sounded so much like people who I had grown up around, you know what I mean, in Alabama. And I just felt really connected to it. You know, there's a rhythm to the language that it can sound, I think, at worst, sort of repetitive and boring. But I think really what he was trying to do was right the way that human beings speak and think.

And, you know, when I think about black people in the South, you know, we kind of naturally speak in this like iambic pentameter kind of way at times. Like when I speak to my pops, for example, you know, I'll call down and, you know, how you doing, man? How's your day going? He might say, I can't kill nothing and look like won't nothing die. You know, and so when I hear, you know, when I read Shakespeare and it just sits in me in a cool way. And there's a lot of people who say that actually the Elizabethans would have spoken Shakespeare is very, very, very close to the American South, the sound of the American South. You know, so I think, I think it just sits in my mouth in a cool way. I think it just fits.

It feels, I feel at home in it. Yeah. Was that instant? Yeah, I mean, for a long time, you know, it felt like it was this thing that was kind of held up, right? Shakespeare was a thing that you had to do or aspire to if you wanted to be a good actor or be thought of as a good actor. And at the same time, it felt it was often presented as this thing that you had to, you know, quote-unquote elevate yourself to. People would say that in school, you know, you have to elevate yourself to meet the language. Wow.

Yeah, and I always find it to be kind of problematic. although I didn't have the language to express why it just it didn't feel right you know what I mean um it probably wasn't until like my senior year of college I uh my mother as I say reads the paper a lot and one day I was home um from school and in the art section of the Birmingham news on the cover of the arts you know page there was a photograph of a of a black man with long dreads holding a skull, York's skull. And it said underneath it,

Adrian Lester, starring in Hamlet at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. And I saw that image and it really brought tears to my eyes because I think prior to that, I had never imagined that a black person could play the title role in a play like that.

You know what I mean? We had done Hamlet and I was Horatio, but I just had somehow like accepted that those characters, the title characters, you know, were meant for other people. And so my mother and my father put a little money together and rented me a car. And it was closing the following day. So I left that next morning, drove to Chicago and sat in line in the theater waiting for, you know, a cancellation, got the last ticket. And at the beginning of the play, Adrian Lester came out and started to play with the to be or not to be speech.

And I sat there and wept like a baby because it just, it really moved. movie, man. I think it was a real turning point. Wow. Yeah. So answer your question, I guess, yeah, it's been a long process of me coming to believe that, like, I can have ownership over any of the parts in Shakespeare in the same way that other people have. Right. When did you come to Richard the second? What was the first time you read it? What were your kind of first impression to display? I think the first time I read it was probably right after graduate. with school. I did a workshop of it with a group called the Shakespeare Society. And I was just blown away by the language. It's amazing. It's incredible, man. I think in all of the, for me, it's

Shakespeare at his best. You know, those speeches that he gives Richard to say are profoundly beautiful. So that was my first contact with the play. And I think that last speech in the play in the prison act five where you yeah i've been studying how i'm and compared to this prison where i live onto the world that speech has has really moved me and i learned it you know during that workshop and sometimes just walking down the street will just say it you know to myself and and uh to me it feels like in that speech it's a man who's learning how to become a full human being this man has like has gotten himself caught up in this world he was born into this world right there has all these expectations of him.

And he does exactly what he's been taught to do, you know. And without a lot of guidance, you know, he doesn't have a father in the play that we know of. So he's a boy who became king at a very young age and is trying to figure out what it means to be a man, right? What it means to be a leader. And he makes mistakes left him right. And it's not until the end of the play that he finds a time to be alone to really sit with himself and reflect. And in doing so, he comes to understand that he is a human being. And before your eyes, you see a person become a person, you know.

Yeah. So I always find that, I just find a speech to be deeply moving. Yeah. I mean, I would love to hear how your approach to this, something that you've been waiting to perform and obviously thinking about it in terms of bodies and things to see. and audiences in seats. What was your first thought when thinking,

okay, we're going to do this in audio instead of on a stage? Well, the first thought was, so I've always had a little bit of a resistance to the play. And I think that's because, for me, as a black actor playing this part, I was concerned that me presenting a man who essentially is an ineffectual leader who gets overthrown by

much more popular young man, right? I was concerned that if the casting of the play, for example, if the Bolingbrook character, the character who ends up taking over at the end is a white man, it might not look good.

So, casting an African-American woman to play Bolinbrook, I think, as a layer of intrigue to the play and kind of shields that. But of course, when we're doing it on the radio, my first thought was, well, how are we going to translate that or is that something that we even need to be concerned about now? You know what I mean? So that was the first thing.

And then secondly, I would say there were all these ideas I had about the play and about the way that I wanted to play the character. When I've seen the play before, he's often presented as this guy who's just a bad dude, who's just clumsy and, like, arrogant and not. a cystic and, you know, a bad leader. But I wanted to tell a story of a man who's doing the best that he can in a world that he just can't quite manage, right? But when you take that off the stage and put it onto radio, then it's difficult to convey that. So those are my concerns. But at the same time, the thing I was really interested in, as I said before, is that last speech,

you know, and how we see this person really expose his own vulnerability. And one of the challenges I find with doing Shakespeare in places like the Delacourt or in these large theaters is that it's very difficult to play intimate, interior moments. So I think that this form will allow people to really hear the words and hear the complexity of the thoughts in a way that sometimes, you know, gets lost in the in the theaters. Yes, so you mentioned the sort of the difficulty of the dynamic between Richard and Bolingbrook in terms of race, in terms of power, in terms of all these. interesting things and how it then changed those dynamics for that person to be a black woman, Miriam. How was it to work with her? Playing with her, she comes to it so prepared. She had explored the text like thoroughly, so she knew exactly what she wanted to do. She doesn't do any of that, you know, fancy kind of highfalutin, you know, language that some people are accustomed

to hearing with Shakespeare. She just makes it, she makes it her own. She puts it into her body. and speaks it, and it sounds beautiful. And I think because she played in that way, you know, it forced me and everybody else also to kind of dig our heels in and come correct, as they say. So I think there was a bit of a kind of, I won't say one-upmanship, but there was a, there was like a healthy kind of competition between the two of us, I would say, that we, that we, we were, I mean, there were two characters who were like fighting for power, right? And so I think that there was a bit of that between she and I as well as actors, which I think helped.

But it definitely made me feel much, much better to know that we had cast, a woman of color in that part. Because I think my worry was that there's a way of doing a play in which, you know, if you have a black Richard and a white bullenbrook, that it could be, you could be seen to be telling the story that black people can't leave. or that there's a problem with black leadership and that only it takes a white man to come back in and restore order. I think when we inhabit these parts, we have to always be cognizant of like the moment that we're in and like the stories that we're telling on top of the story itself. But when Miriam came in and smashed it, like that was out the window.

It then was just about the play. You know, and these two people who are fighting for what they believe in. essentially. The other stuff you're talking about, you know, the perception that casting creates, that just seems to me so in some ways like a double duty, right, that you're not just doing the play. You're thinking about the story that your presence is telling. I mean, you could call it a burden, you could call it a duty, you could call it just another intellectual challenge, but how does that live in your mind? Man, that's a deep question, bro. I mean, I've thought about a lot older years and have gone through, I think, every version of it.

I feel like there were times when I felt like it was a burden because I felt like, well, I just want to be able to do the play and, you know, just do my work as an actor. Right. But I think now what I feel is that it really is a privilege, you know. I've come to the point in my life where I'm really embracing my responsibility as an artist because it is a responsibility. You know, it's not just, it's different, man. It's not just about I want to be good and do this part because I like the part.

No, like me getting on that stage and whatever play I'm in is a statement that means something to somebody. You know what I mean? And I want to really take care of that. I think, you know, I remember when I was in school, man, I would look at these plays like Hamlet, like Shakespeare, for example, right? There would be if you're going to do Hamlet, if you're going to have somebody black and it's going to be Horatio, maybe Laertis. You know what I'm saying? Maybe. One of those.

Maybe. If you're going to do Romeo and Juliet, you're going to have Mercutio probably could be black. You know what I'm saying? Not Romeo, but Mercutio. You know, and on and on. Cherry Orchard, you know, Lepakhin, he's often played with black man. You know, the guy who comes back for his land and his inheritance because his father was a, you know, a servant. There were just these, you know, Aaron the Moore or, you know, Othello.

There were just these kind of like characters that I think like myself and other black actors I know just sort of accepted. Like, okay, well, these are the ones that are going to be available to us. I remember when I was in college and even in grad school, when people would say, oh, you're interested in Shakespeare, the first day and say is, oh, you know, a fellow, you know, have you played a fellow? And for that reason, for a long time, I was like, man, I ain't never going to touch Othello. I don't want to, because just because everybody thinks that that's the only thing we can do, I'm not going to do it. So when that opportunity came along to play the part, I was resistant to it at first. it definitely kicked my butt that play in that part.

So in some ways, I think I accepted that for a long time as being true. But that's over, man. Like, that's all that's changed now. Sometimes, right, the way that acting is taught in schools, you know, you do your research about the world of the play. You figure out what the character's motivations are, what the obstacles are, You know, what the things are doing to move their life forward, all these things, right? But at a certain point, I've always found as a black actor, if I'm playing, if I'm the only black actor in the Cherry Orchard, right, or in, or in, you know, whatever, an Ibson play.

At a certain point, I come to the place where I go, well, you know, what is the world of this play? Cherry Orchette takes place in Russia. So are we, how does this make sense, right? conventional wisdom and the acting teachers will say, well, it's just a play. And so nobody is going to see your color. Nobody cares. It's just we're all just actors inhabiting this play. Of course,

except that after the play, all these people will come up to me and say, pull me in a corner and say, oh, you did a really nice job. But you know, there weren't really black people in Russia at that time. Oh, it's so nice that they gave you this part, that they cast you in this part. It's really, you know, I mean, we know it's not really accurate, but little things. You sound like you've had hundreds of these guys. hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these things, you know. And at the same time, like, we're American actors doing a Russian play.

But for some reason, nobody ever questions the fact that these are American actors speaking English. And, like, their accents from, some from Minnesota, some from New York, some from Alabama. Nobody questions that. But, like, when the black dude's in the play, that's the thing that everybody sees. And yet we act like we don't see it when we want to, you know what I mean? When it comes to talking about it. So, I mean, I suppose it's like what it means to be black in America, right? Like you're always aware of where you fit in any particular room.

And you can either see that as a burden or you can see it as like a superpower. And I just choose to see it as a superpower. Andre Holland stars in Richard the Second, a collaboration between the public theater and WNYC. You can find the episodes at WNYC.org slash Shakespeare. They're hosted by the New Yorkers theater critic, Vincent Cunningham, who spoke with Andre Holland. Thanks for listening.

and please join us next time.