It’s a new look for a still-menacing king

For 429 years, actors have been striding onstage to proclaim: “Now is the winter of our discontent.”
Laurence Olivier and Ian McKellen did it in movies of Shakespeare’s “Richard III.” Al Pacino, Mark Rylance, Jose Ferrer and others did it on Broadway. There have been at least 21 productions on Broadway, maybe 21 zillion in England.
Most of the stars have (like the real King Richard III) been male and white. “Four-and-a-half centuries of white dudes – I mean, let’s shake it up a little,” Danai Gurira said to the Television Critics Association.
That’s what she did in a New York Central Park show, which will air at 9 p.m. Friday (May 19) on PBS’ “Great Performances.” Gurira (shown here) – best known as Odeye, the African warrior leader in “Black Panther” movies – is Richard.
What would Shakespeare say? Maybe “he would say, ‘It’s about time,’” director Robert O’Hara said.
O’Hara put lots of diversity in the show. It’s important, he said, for “people to see someone in a wheelchair or to see deaf actors or a smaller-statured actor.”
In Gurira, he has a TV star (“The Walking Dead”) and movie star who’s immersed in Shakespeare.
She was born in Grinnell, Iowa (where her parents were a chemistry professor and a college librarian), but at 5 moved with them to their native land, which is now Zimbabwe. As a former British colony, she said, that had an education that emphasized Shakespeare.
She continued that in college (Macalester, in Minnesota) and grad school (Tisch, at New York University). She’s done lots of Shakespeare, including a previous Central Park show.
That was “Measure for Measure,” a decade ago, in an un-Richard-like role: “I played the opposite character … Isabella, and she’s like this perfectly sinless being.”
Now she’s Richard, who is perfectly sinful and scheming. He kills people often – one of them brutally, in a flashforward before the story even begins.
Then the show re-sets with its usual opening – Richard saying “Now is the winter of our discontent.”
That speech has echoed for centuries. John Steinbeck titled a novel “The Winter of Our Discontent”: other books have been titled “The Winter of Our Disconnect” and even “The Winter of Our Discotheque.” How did she make the speech feel like her own?
Fortunately, Gurira said, the show was being prepared in New York, where all her theater teachers live. “I got them together – like an ‘it takes a village’ type of thing.”
A month before the full rehearsals began, she was “boot-camping,” focusing on everything – including that opener. “I would go through that speech, … just syllable-by-syllable, over and over, many, many ways and times.”
And yes, she created a Richard who feels fresh and different – yet as menacing as ever. Audiences will soon believe that an Iowan/Zimbabwean movie star has transported to the English monarchy.