[In the following review, Feingold appraises two productions of Richard II, one by the Theatre for a New Audience at New York City's St. Clement's Theater, directed by Ron Daniels, and the other staged by the Pearl Theatre. Feingold observes that while both plays had their strengths as well as effective scenes, each seemed to lose something as it went on. Reviewing Pearl's production, directed by Shepard Sobel, Feingold states that while it was not as vivid as Daniels's production, it had a stronger grasp of the play as poetry.]

To have one company play Richard II and Richard III in alternation makes sense. The two unheroic heroes are opposite extremes on the spectrum of kingship: the king who gives up all too easily and the shameless one who stops at nothing. Each has an antagonist, too, with a slight resemblance to the other, which makes double-casting logical: Tough, pragmatic Bolingbroke is a Richard III with moral scruples, while “deep revolving” Buckingham shows twinges of Richard II's faintness of heart. Richard II—often, though not here, played as a crypto-queer—sloughs women off, preferring his “caterpillars”; Richard III, embittered by his ineligibility as a wooer, takes pleasure in abusing them, for which they exact due revenge in curses and confrontations. As those suggest, both plays are feats of rhetoric, studies in the poetics as well as the ethics of kingship. Visions, dreams, and prophecies dog the characters' tracks; in more than one dispute, the moral victor is the one with the quickest verbal comeback. If the action, in its bleakness and violence, suggests a prelude to King Lear, the language rings with echoes of the innocently playful Love's Labour's Lost.

The other reason R2 and R3 should be played in rep is that the undertaking is big, bold, and difficult. New York, the most complacent and money-minded of all the world's great theater cities, doesn't face such a challenge very often. Our serious companies hang on by a shoestring, while what should be our major theaters cozy up to the public with anodyne new plays and sentimental rehashes of Broadways past, leaning on star actors and making no pretense of forming a company—essential for Shakespeare, who created his plays for one.

Theatre for a New Audience has assembled for its two-play rep a core group of strong professionals with a supporting cast mostly of non-Equity newcomers. The inevitable imbalance in the playing makes an apt reflection of Ron Daniels's productions, each of which is full of strong choices and effective scenes but seems to diminish as it goes on; pairing the two has given each a bit less than it deserves.

Neil Patel's set is dominated, for R2, by a vast, circular cathedral window—removed, for R3, to create a gaping hole, ruins from the Yorkist wars still smoldering in it. So we know this is a land where kingship is sanctified by God, and dethroning a legitimate king will catapult us into moral chaos. The only problem is that Richard II isn't much of a god-king, and Daniels's perspective doesn't give us a clue to his inner failings, which are the source of his toppling. While Richard strives manfully to be just and wise during the Mowbray-Bolingbroke feud, his heart is elsewhere, and any interpretation depends on which elsewhere the director chooses. The true king whom Richard becomes at the end is a soul of a different order.

Not much of this is visible in Daniels's treatment, busy adumbrating an absolute moral order to which none of the characters, not even John of Gaunt, really subscribe. While this relativism might set up Richard's downfall—he's disillusioned when he sees that it's all a pose—Daniels doesn't use it that way. We don't get a Richard bearing the seeds of self-destruction at the start, nor a transcendent Richard at the cursory end. So we aren't prepared when the astonishing thing happens: In the middle, Richard is in love with poetic irony, and in Steven Skybell we have an actor for whom poetic irony is like a second central nervous system. From the despair before his surrender through the desperate farewell to his queen, Skybell is enthralling—burning the way tears can burn, funny as only the blackest despair can be funny.

If Daniels is uncertain about the nature of R2's rise and fall, R3 leaves him even more constrained: Here is a character who never alters, morally or otherwise. Shaw's image of the play as an ultimate version of Punch and Judy points unerringly to its only source of tension: Richard's relations with the audience. Unlike his coevals, we know what he's up to. If there's no surprise for us in how he's received, no change in tone from the tragedy he inflicts to the comedy he shares with us, the actor has nowhere to go. Christopher McCann, a great hand at chilling mordancy, is no ingratiating comic. A cool, close-to-the-vest Bolingbroke, his moral disquiet bubbling up from below, he makes an oddly monochrome Richard, seemingly entangled in an inner agenda almost as complex as his physical twists and hobbles. He drives forcefully down this one-lane path, barely stopping to deceive the others, let alone amuse us. Skybell, his Buckingham, can hardly get a word of encouragement in before his almost automatic rejection.

Luckily, R3 is woman-hounded, and Daniels supplies three splendid actresses to stop him in his tracks. Laurie Kennedy, Duchess of York in both plays, rings as true in the comedy of Aumerle's pardon in R2 as she does while cursing her own son in R3. Pamela Payton-Wright's slow, grave ferocity is the next best thing to the grandeur Margaret of Anjou requires. R3's Elizabeth has to mix canny strength with suppressed hysteria; my only quibble about Sharon Scruggs, towering in her strength, is that at points she lets the hysteria out.

Helmar Augustus Cooper comes off strongly as both a bluff Northumberland and a ruefully empathetic Brakenbury. In R2, Graham Brown is a movingly crestfallen Duke of York; Robert Stattel, as John of Gaunt, handles the famous speech with such elegant theatricality that it nearly renews itself. The rest are negligible, except for Tom Hammond, a touching Bagot and a creepily servile Catesby. Patricia Dunnock's strained Queen Isabel and Lady Anne confirm what Strictly Dishonorable revealed: her gift is for light comedy.

Stattel, doubling as the Bishop of Carlisle, does less well with R2's visionary foreshadowing of the civil wars to come. That John Wylie, taking on the same dual role in the Pearl's R2, succeeds hauntingly with it shows you what a small-scale troupe can bring Shakespeare that those who think bigger often can't. Directed by Shepard Sobel, the Pearl's version is stiff-jointed, nowhere near as vivid in its physicality as Daniels's. But Murrell Horton's designs—lush gold and ochre costumes against bare black panels—rivet the eye, and the sense of the play as poetry is often a good deal stronger than at St. Clement's. Bradford Cover has seized on just the aspect of Richard that Daniels downplays: his actorish manner. Cover is a showy performer, and R2 loves showing off; for him every event is a new role, exploited by Cover with skill and vocal grace. Though lacking Skybell's fiery anguish, he's actually more moving at the end, as Hope Chernov's delicate, restrained Queen is throughout. (Caveat: In prior seasons, I've translated for the Pearl.)

Here, too, the supporting cast is often less than it should be—Seth Jones, the Bolingbroke, is so good in quiet moments that you wonder why he yells so much—but the presence of a permanent company gives a feeling of everyone working together, on a mission both important and pleasurable, that show-by-show enterprises can never quite evoke. The final argument against Daniels's exciting conception is that it would make most sense for a resident acting troupe.

Such a troupe, of course, requires actors, which was one of the two things wrong with Gregory Wolfe's ingenious, misguided R3 for the young company called Moonwork Inc. The other was the central premise—that Shakespeare only makes sense if you dress it in glib contemporary analogies, like turning the kings into Mafia dons. Yeah, you can predict the rest: The Lord Mayor's plea was covered on CNN, and Margaret's curse came via Internet. It would all be very convincing, if John Gotti lived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Or if the cast had had the suppleness of voice and passion that you need for Shakespeare—which it didn't, except for Gregory Sherman's Pacino-ish Richard and Paula Stevens's crisp Elizabeth. Still, a young group's reach should exceed its grasp. Criticism, like R2's gardener, just has to bind up the unruly children sometimes.