Another Bard, Another Park

A reimagined Richard III in Harlem

seize the king is in Marcus Garvey Park through July 29.

outdoor theater is one of our city’s purest traditions: gorgeous performances in green surroundings, free for all. Certainly this summer, open-air productions are a civic lifeline—but at the Classical Theatre of Harlem, the gathering has taken on an even more intense sense of mission. For years, CTH’s Uptown Shakespeare in the Park at Richard Rodgers Amphitheater in Marcus Garvey Park presented the European canon, including Antigone, Romeo and Juliet, and The Bacchae. This summer, though, producing artistic director Ty Jones has put up a new classic, Will Power’s Seize

the King, a contemporary verse play built on old bones.

A decade before Hamilton, in plays like

Flow (2003) and The Seven (2006), Power established a hip-hop theater tradition. With Seize the King, he engages an older lyric strategy, slicing through contemporary culture to show its sedimentary underlayers. Power’s often comic drama uses the story from Shakespeare’s

Richard III—a wicked duke murders his way to the crown—and he tells it using metered, heightened language. But Power yokes the galloping Elizabethan lyric to modernity. Seize the King’s reality is half then, half now. A queen may muse, “Why, I might choose me, that’s a thought / Why not? Have I not half the council in my bra strap?” It’s also a familiar place where an insecure state kills a Black child. And although the play predates the January insurrection, its portrait of a man who won’t not be king seems predictive. Still, “this is not Trump walking around onstage,” Power says. “It’s more like, Who are we as a species? How do we deal with these different energies that have always existed?”

The play’s director, Carl Cofield, says, “We try to be a theater company that’s in conversation with the world around us and the Harlem community,” and he notes the performance stimulates conversation about those who claim to serve. It’s not just a play for 2021 and its elections, though—it redefines the whole notion of “classical.” In staking out a new pantheon for living Black writers, CTH plans to seize first the king, then the canon. “That’s where we are in a global reckoning, an artistic reckoning,” Cofield says. “And that’s something that Classical Theatre of Harlem has been trying to drill down into. What makes something stand the test of time?”