Role with it
THE INCITE SHAKESPEARE COMPANY TACKLES RICHARD III WITH NONTRADITIONAL FLAIR
Toward the end of Richard III, the title character’s simmering internal conflict boils over in a post-dream soliloquy in which he poses questions, then answers them. In the experimental Incite Shakespeare Company Santa Fe’s staging, his conflict is decidedly more external. Troupe veterans Alexander Lane and Geoffrey Pomeroy both portray the scheming, murderous Richard III, alternating solo scenes and appearing simultaneously during the character’s slips into self-reflection. They’ve shared the stage several times before — including in the New Mexico Actors Lab’s production of The Seafarer in 2022 — but this is their first and very likely last experience playing the same character in the same show. Incite’s production runs through July 23.
“The challenge is, even though he’s playing the other half, that’s still me. That’s still my character,” Pomeroy says. “He’s just the one actively in the scene, interacting with the other characters and saying the lines, but I’m going to be on that journey emotionally. It’s not like watching another character; it’s almost like a dissociative state where my character will be watching himself in certain portions.”
The play begins with King Edward IV’S brother, Richard of Gloucester, romantically pursuing the widowed Lady Anne. She ends up marrying him, unaware that he killed her father-in-law, King Henry VI. Richard then arranges for the imprisonment and eventual killing of his older brother Clarence, the first in a series of slayings and imprisonments targeting family members and anyone else who gets in Richard’s way of the crown.
Richard checks all the boxes as a murderous lout, yet he maintains at least one unlikely friend throughout the play: the audience.
“He’s so charismatic and enduring,” Pomeroy says. “Richard is kind of the epitome of, ‘I’m a good person; don’t you believe me? I’m such a [jerk], and I’m going to kill everybody.’ He lets the audience in on it in a way that
makes them feel included and brought along on this fun journey — even though it’s murderous and evil and dark in a lot of ways.”
Director Ariana Karp describes the two Richard roles as his public and private personas, although that dynamic shifts when both Richards are on stage.
“He’s like, ‘This is what I’m going to do. Are you with me? Are you with me?’” Karp says of Richard’s confiding in the audience. “I had a thought about [the two actors] tossing ideas between the two of them, the way that you would work through a problem or an argument by yourself.”
Pasatiempo interviewed Karp, Pomeroy, and Lane less than three weeks before Richard III’S run begins. That close to a production, most companies are well into rehearsals, the director making adjustments as the actors gain familiarity and confidence with the material.
In the case of Richard III, the trio used terms such as “if” and “would,” as they were still two weeks from rehearsals. In another break from tradition, cast and crew are cramming for 10 to 12 hours a day, five days before the show opens. Karp chose the alternate preparation method, aimed at mimicking the workload borne by early Shakespearean actors, and says the audience might notice — but not in a negative way.
“Every show is different because the actors really trust each other,” she says. “They trust that they know their line, and there is an exciting energy in the space.”
Neither Lane nor Pomeroy has experience preparing using the method Karp calls a quick raise.
“I’ve been doing theater for 25-plus years; I’ve been doing three or four plays a year my whole adult life,” Pomeroy says. “It’s not often that a challenge is presented that I have yet to face. This scares me, and that’s why I need to do it.”
Lane says he looks forward to the compressed preparation, likening it to burrowing with cast and crew at theater camp. He adds that he has heard comparisons between the adrenaline rush an actor experiences going onstage and the adrenaline boost an astronaut feels when being shot into space.
“I’ve never verified that, but I love the idea,” he says. “Of course it’s going to be a little nerve-wracking, but then we get to go to space.”
Richard III is Shakespeare’s second-longest play; Karp estimates that she trimmed it from about 4½ hours to two, with one intermission
“I’ve done four plays with the ISC now, and [Geoffrey Pomeroy, left] has been in all of them. He has become a brother, a friend, a valued collaborator. Every time you step out there on stage with him, he’s like, ‘I’m here. I’m here with you.’ And that’s rarer than you might think.” — Alexander Lane
halfway through. Full versions include more than 30 actors, she says, while the Incite version has 12, including herself.
The main character and his at-any-cost ambition might remind audience members of a more-recent larger-than-life political figure, Karp says.
“We just did a table read with our cast,” she says. “There were a couple of moments where people just gasped, and somebody was like, ‘Was this written yesterday?’ There are moments you realize that the intersection of violence and politics has been a thing for a very, very, very long time.”
Both Lane and Pomeroy credit Karp not just for the idea of splitting the character, but for unwittingly giving them confidence that it would work.
“If anyone else had asked me, I might have hesitated, but I trust Ariana so much,” Lane says. “I lived and worked in New York and then Chicago. To find her here in my own backyard — because I grew up here in Santa Fe and moved back at the beginning of the pandemic — has been very meaningful to me.”
With preparation time truncated, personal relationships and trust become especially important. Lane does not spare Pomeroy when praising cast and crew.
“I’ve done four plays with the ISC now, and he’s been in all of them,” he says of Pomeroy. “He has become a brother, a friend, a valued collaborator. Every time you step out there on stage with him, he’s like, ‘I’m here. I’m here with you.’ And that’s rarer than you might think.”
Without knowing he has been complimented, Pomeroy returns the kind words.
“He came from Chicago right after COVID and was able to get into one of our productions,” he says of Lane. “And from the very first readthrough we had, it was like, ‘Who the hell is this guy, and why haven’t I seen him before?’ He’s got a John Malkovich kind of calm and strength and intelligence. I hope to work with Alexander for the next 30 years. I mean, I hope we have that kind of enduring partnership.”
Richard III’S political intrigue puts recent events — and people’s perception of progress — in perspective, Karp says.
“Certain elements are very reassuring,” she says. “Like, gosh, we’re still struggling with the same huge questions as they were 400 years ago. There are also elements of, ‘Wow, how have we still not figured this out?’
“I think the reason that we keep doing these plays over and over is that they speak to us still. We see ourselves in these characters and their struggles, their mistakes, and their triumphs.”