Teenage Dick by Ma-Yi Theater Company (review)

In the late nineties and early aughts, a number of major films were released that set the plots of Shakespearean plays within the world of American high schools, including Gil Junger's 10 Things I Hate About You(1999), Tim Blake Nelson's O(2001), and Andy Fickman's She's the Man(2006). To some degree, these films obscure their Shakespearean origins, at least from a marketing perspective. I have taught many undergraduates who adored She's the Manwithout realizing that that it is an adaptation of Twelfth Night.

Yet Mike Lew, in his new play Teenage Dick, takes a strikingly different tack. Teenage Dickassumes a basic familiarity with Richard III, which was not problematic for audiences at the Public Theater, which annually produces Shakespeare in the Park, especially considering the glut of productions of Richard IIIthat have appeared in New York since the dawn of the Trump Era (most notably Thomas Ostermeier's version at BAM and as part of Ivo van Hove's Kings of War). Playing on the conventions of both Shakespeare's plays and the genre of high school dramas, Lew, director Moritz von Steulpnagel, and the extraordinary designers and cast created a searing yet frequently hilarious examination of disability, otherness, and what it takes to turn a person into what we would call a "villain."

Shakespeare's Richard of Gloucester, at the opening of his play, announces in soliloquy that "since I cannot prove a lover / To entertain these fair well-spoken days, / I am determined to prove a villain" (1.1.28–30). And of course he does just that, gleefully murdering many of the other characters in his play, including his own brother, wife, and young nephews. Lew's play complicates the question of how Richard arrives at this villainy, engaging with contemporary discussions of disability. Lew's play acknowledges that few people simply announce a choice to be malicious, even when they have been ostracized from society due to disability or difference.

Lew's adaptation is pared down to six characters: Richard Gloucester, the junior class secretary who has cerebral palsy; his best friend Barbara "Buck" Buckingham, who uses a wheelchair; Elizabeth York, a well-meaning English teacher and faculty liaison for student government; Eddie Ivy, the junior class president, a jock, and a bully; Clarissa Duke, the junior class vice-president, an overachieving ultra-religious type; and Anne Margaret, a dancer, Eddie's ex, and formerly one of the most popular girls in school. Lew's Richard is determined to become senior class president—he just has to find a way to get Eddie and Clarissa out of the way. He lights upon the idea of becoming Anne's boyfriend, catapulting himself to new popularity. Yet his campaign does not go exactly as planned. Richard's debate with Eddie is a disaster in which he is publicly shamed via social media. But when Richard has genuinely earned Anne's trust, she reveals a secret to him that he uses to destroy Eddie—and, in the process, Clarissa and Anne.

At first, the very fact of setting a Shakespearean plot in a high school, utilizing only six actors, removing most of the verse (Lew's Richard has a weird habit of speaking in iambic pentameter; Buck repeatedly tells him to stop), and running only ninety minutes without an intermission might seem like the height of reductiveness, removing all of the grandeur from this early Shakespearean play. But part of Lew's point is that Shakespeare's Richard is ultimately a cartoon...