King Richard’s fair The Actors’ Shakespeare Project debuts BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Richard III By William Shakespeare. Directed by Benjamin Evett. Set decoration by Troy Siebels. Costume coordination by Leea Regan. Lighting by Michael Harris. Music composed and performed by Bill Barclay. Violence design by Bob Walsh. With John Kuntz, Allyn Burrows, Ken Cheeseman, Sarah Newhouse, Jennie Israel, Paula Langton, David Evett, Maureen Regan, Yavni Bar-Yam, Richard Snee, Marya Lowry, Paula Plum, Greg Steres, Michael F. Walker, Bobbie Steinbach, Benjamin Evett, Khalil Flemming or Carlos Rojas, and Addison Williams or David Mokriski. Presented by the Actors’ Shakespeare Project at Old South Meeting House through November 7.

"Richard III is a grand parodist," says Harold Bloom in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. So, on a less deadly scale, is playwright/performer John Kuntz. And like spinally challenged Dick Crookback, audience favorite Kuntz is possessed of an almost maniacal energy. So why doesn’t he work as the Bard’s deliciously Machiavellian black-comic villain in this the inaugural outing of the Actors’ Shakespeare Project? Although he affects no limp or dragging foot, Kuntz does sport a hump beneath his gray business suit, and he manipulates his withered arm as both claw and Señor Wences–type puppet. With his abundant dark hair and prominent nose, he even looks a little like Laurence Olivier, whose chillingly magnetic Richard was enshrined in his 1955 film. But Kuntz’s Richard, given to petulant snits and Peter Pan-like crowing, is neither seductive nor dangerous. Moreover, Richard is a good if brazen actor, and Kuntz sometimes plays him like a bad one whose dissembling — for example, in the scene where he reluctantly allows himself to be torn from his prayer book to take the crown — wouldn’t fool even a citizenry duped by Dubya.

Richard III is not a subtle play. The question is whether this early, Tudor-apologist history is a flagrant potboiler saved by an irresistible villain or a modern, sado-masochistic tragicomedy in which the audience, like Romans in the Colosseum, derives pleasure from watching a fork-tongued beast maul everyone from bureaucrats to babes, whacking his way to the throne while showing less remorse than Tony Soprano.

Director Benjamin Evett, founder of the Actors’ Shakespeare Project, doesn’t rigidly subscribe to either view. He understands that Richard III serves nicely as a metaphor for political evil everywhere, but he doesn’t shove his modern-dress production into a particular shoe. The director, who also plays the heroically usurping Richmond (grandfather of Shakespeare’s sovereign), resembles George W. Bush and even gets down to the business of rolling up his dress-shirt sleeves at Bosworth Field. But Evett isn’t making specific parallels between current American politics, however polarized, and the derision- and division-riddled Richard III. Trouble is, he doesn’t do a hell of a lot else with it either — other than put it up in historic Old South Meeting Hall, thus placing a political drama in a political setting, however unconnected. And the fact is that Old South is an uncomfortable theater: the pew-like seats are hard, despite whoopee cushions emblazoned with the ASP logo, and the high bench backs and flat floor make for difficult sight lines. Neither does the space conform to Evett’s stated goals of intimacy and immediacy, though the acoustics are quite good, allowing for more declamation than we need.

This failure of purpose does not make the Actors’ Shakespeare Project an unworthy undertaking. Evett, inspired by the late-’70s Royal Shakespeare Company Macbeth starring Ian McKellen and Judi Dench that he saw as a teen (and possibly turned off by his 20-year experience with American Repertory Theatre high-concept Shakespeare, from Hamlet in pajamas to Richard II in jockstraps), seeks to present the Bard’s plays simply, in non-traditional settings, with emphasis on the text and the actors. This approach appeals to actors, of course, and Evett has gathered some of Boston’s best, not all of whom are at their best in Richard III. The less said of Paula Plum’s 1930s-Vampira-style Queen Margaret, her hair in a ducktail, and trilling her florid curses over the rim of a cocktail glass, the better. There are, however, some accomplished performances, as well as some audacious moments for Kuntz, as when he violently kisses Marya Lowry’s scathing spin doctor of a Buckingham on the lips just before intermission. Lowry handles the Bard’s language expertly, and Jennie Israel, among the women playing women, conveys the anger and pathos of these marital power pawns. Shakespeare & Company vet Allyn Burrows is an open and touching Clarence, quietly delivering the play’s most powerful speech (certainly the best not uncorked from the "bottled spider"), the soon-to-be-murdered man’s undersea vision of his impending death. And he returns as a crisply John Dean–like Catesby. George Steres gives a moving account of the moribund Edward IV, valiantly negotiating peace among his cat-fighting court. Ken Cheeseman is an energetic and dapper, if troubled, Hastings. And Evett rallies the troops effectively as Richmond. Unfortunately, as director, he fails to understand that eschewing a concept isn’t the same as eschewing an idea.