Reunited for ‘Richard II’ at the Old Globe

The story of Shakespeare’s “Richard II” revolves around two men who would be king.

The story of the Old Globe Theatre’s return to the darkly poetic history play, though, revolves around two artists seemingly destined to be creative partners — even if it took a quarter-century to make it happen.

The full-circle saga starts in 1993, when Erica Schmidt — who’s now directing the Globe’s Shakespeare Festival-opening production of “Richard II” — had just graduated from Rancho Bernardo High School and was about to head off to college as a theater major.

That summer, Schmidt’s parents took her to see the Globe staging of Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” starring Hal Holbrook and featuring Robert Sean Leonard (then in his early 20s and a newly minted movie star) as Edgar.

“It really moved me,” Schmidt says of the show now. “It was one of those times when you’re watching Shakespeare and then suddenly you just can’t stop weeping.

“I was really young, but I just thought it was so extraordinary.”

‘King Richard II’

When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Sundays. (No performance July 4; additional performance at 8 p.m. July 3.) Through July 15.

Where: Old Globe’s Lowell Davies Festival Theatre, Balboa Park.

Tickets: $29 and up

Phone: (619) 234-5623

Online: theoldglobe.org

After the performance, Schmidt waited near the stage door with her parents, hoping to meet Leonard. He didn’t show.

But undaunted, she drove back to the Globe the next evening, and this time managed to get a moment with the actor.

“I just told him that I wanted to work in theater, and I thought maybe I wanted to be an actor,” Schmidt recalls. “ And he told me that acting is like the line that Gloucester says (in ‘Lear’) when he’s on the cliff: ‘And yet I know not how conceit may rob the treasury of life when life itself yields to the theft.’

“The idea that if you actually believe you’re dead, how are you not dead? And (he said) that was the secret to acting.”

She adds with a laugh: “I wrote it down and carried it with me for a really long time!”

That might’ve been the end of it, save for fate and Shakespeare. Some eight years later, Leonard came to see a much-buzzed New York production of “As You Like It,” which was being staged in an East Village parking lot and eventually would land at the renowned Public Theater.

Its director? Erica Schmidt.

“I was like, ‘Omigosh, you told me this thing!,” she said to Leonard after the show, reminding him of their original meeting at the Globe. “And he was like: ‘I remember ... that ... happening?’” He was very kind about the show.”

Heartened by his interest, Schmidt visited Leonard’s stage door once again — this time when he was appearing in Broadway’s “The Invention of Love” — and dropped off a copy of a play she thought they ought to do together.

The work: “Richard II.”

She didn’t hear back. But more coincidences were in store; both she and Leonard were longtime friends of Barry Edelstein, then of Classic Stage Co. and (later) the Public Theater, and now the Old Globe’s artistic director.

And in 2005, Schmidt would marry the actor Peter Dinklage, the current “Game of Thrones” star and another friend of Leonard’s from way back.

Finally, when both Schmidt and Leonard were in talks with Edelstein a couple of years ago about doing Shakespeare at the Globe, their partnership on “Richard II” coalesced.

And now the two are back on the turf where they had their first conversation about acting, theater and Shakespeare 24 years ago.

“She is wonderful,” says Leonard of Schmidt. “I love her direction. I think she’s really, really strong — one of the really strong directors of my generation.

“I wouldn’t want to do it with anyone else.”

Finding ‘Richard’

Schmidt’s time in San Diego was relatively brief; she was only here for her junior and senior years of high school.

So “Richard II” is in a sense more of a homecoming for Leonard, who was at the Globe just four years ago as Henry Higgins in the late director Nicholas Martin’s production of “Pygmalion.”

Jack O’Brien, the former Globe artistic chief who directed Leonard all those years ago in “Lear,” also directed Broadway’s “Invention of Love,” for which Leonard won a Tony Award.

Back when Schmidt first met him, Leonard was best-known for his roles in such movies as “Dead Poets Society” and the Bard adaptation “Much Ado About Nothing.” Now, he’s also familiar to TV audiences for his eight years on the medical drama “House,” and to theater fans for his 13 Broadway shows (including the just-closed revival of “Sunday in the Park With George”).

Schmidt, who’s a playwright as well as a busy New York director, has taken on a wide range of material, with Shakespeare in the thick of it. But “Richard II” will be her first Bard history play.

The saga centers on the tension between Richard, the young and in some ways hapless 14th-century English king, and his ambitious but principled cousin Henry Bolingbroke.

There is plenty of bad blood between them, but the work also turns on the notion of the “divine right of kings” — by which Richard believes he has been anointed from on high to lead — and on Henry’s (and English society’s) growing skepticism of the idea.

The play is known for its rich language as well as (for some directors) the difficulties it poses in knowing what to make of the title character.

“Sometimes people portray Richard as sort of weak or simpering or frivolous or petty, and then Bolingbroke is often portrayed as a butcher or a usurper,” says Schmidt, mentioning one production that had bodies hanging from the rafters at the end.

“I’m posing it as a much more even struggle, with two men who have very different ideas of politics and of governance. And one who thinks it’s enough to present an image — which I think is very relevant (now).

“And then another who is much more agile at political craft, at dealing with the people, at getting what he wants without asking for it directly — but by making people think it’s their own idea to give it to him.

“I’m hoping that the audience’s allegiance will go back and forth, scene to scene. That we will feel we know both these men, or that we understand them. It’s not a like a black-and-white (question), but much more complicated and psychologically rich, I’m hoping.”

Leonard is quick to admit that he’s “not a big fan of Shakespeare’s young men,” including the “Lear” role of Edward that Schmidt saw him in.

“I enjoyed playing Claudio, mostly because (“Much Ado” film director) Ken Branagh cut the (dickens) out of the script,” he says. “But I find most of his young-man roles fickle and petulant and just annoying.

“Every time Romeo’s onstage, I wish it were Juliet, and every time Edgar walks onstage I want to go to the refreshment stand. I just think they’re dolts. Maybe (Shakespeare) hated young men, I don’t know.

“But Richard, I think, is sort of the first really complex, interesting young man. And then it leads to all the great ones.”

Of course, while Leonard had always wanted to play the role, now that he’s doing it he “can’t regret it more, because it’s so hard and I’m failing miserably day after day,” he says — seemingly only half in jest.

“It’s a tricky play. It’s one of the most beautiful of his plays — the poetry is incredibly moving and gorgeous and vivid and surprising.

“But how to portray this particular guy is a unique puzzle.”

He and Schmidt do agree on the poetry part: “The language in the play is so beautiful,” she says.

Beyond that, Schmidt says, “I’m really interested in the way Shakespeare reveals the character over the course of the play. It’s so different from the other plays. (Richard) really doesn’t have a soliloquy until his final scene.

“I’m really interested in the finding of his humanity, and the idea of the public figure and then the personal. He actually was someone who didn’t really have a behind-the-scenes, closed-door, private self. I think he really embraced the trappings of his position.

“And then slowly, over the course of the play, he has to realize he needs friends, and he has a real responsibility to other human beings.

“I feel like that’s really relevant right now.”

The Bard and more

“King Richard II” opens the Old Globe’s two-play Shakespeare Festival. Here’s what else is on the summer docket at the Balboa Park theater — in the festival and beyond:

• “Hamlet”: Globe artistic chief Barry Edelstein takes his first crack at directing the Bard’s great tragedy, Aug. 6 to Sept. 10, as the second show in the Shakespeare Festival.
• “Guys and Dolls”: Josh Rhodes, who choreographed the Globe’s world-premiere production of the Steve Martin/Edie Brickell musical “Bright Star” (and took it to Broadway), returns to direct a fresh revival of the musical favorite, July 2 to Aug. 13.
• “Robin Hood!”: Playwright Ken Ludwig, whose credits include the Tony Award-winning farce “Lend Me a Tenor” as well as the Globe-launched comedy “Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery,” delivers a world-premiere comic take on the legend of the man in tights, July 22 to Aug. 27.

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Twitter: @jimhebert

jim.hebert@sduniontribune.com