“I think most of the time, we are watching people deal with extraordinary circumstances,” director Craig Baldwin tells a room full of actors in a midtown rehearsal space.
It’s an unseasonably warm Sunday afternoon in mid-October, and the group has gathered for their final rehearsal of Richard II before advancing to tech week at the Astor Place Theatre. After an off-book run-through of the show, they’ve changed into comfier clothes and are sitting, scripts and notebooks in hand, in the part of the room labeled “stage right,” eager for more feedback from their director.
“The humanness of [the play] is that we watch how all these different people deal with those things in a country that is falling apart,” Baldwin goes on. “What are the choices people make? Who is trying to make the country fall apart and who is trying to rebuild it?”
A day prior, New York’s massive “No Kings” protest had streamed down the avenue directly outside the building, giving an uncanny topicality to a play written over four centuries ago: In this room, a king is hanging on to his power for dear life.
Richard II isn’t a play that most lay audiences, particularly in America, know well. The first work in Shakespeare’s Henriad tetralogy, it dramatizes moments that preceded England’s tumultuous, multi-generational civil war. At its center are King Richard—played in this version by Michael Urie—who banishes his cousin Henry Bolingbroke (Grantham Coleman), seizes noble land, levies controversial taxes, and becomes incredibly unpopular through his mismanagement of kingdom resources. Eventually deposed and imprisoned by Bolingbroke, Richard—spoiler alert!—is murdered in prison.
The obvious thing would be to play Richard as aloof and petulant; he was only 10 when he ascended to power, after all. But this production “highlights how being king is not easy,” Urie tells me. (He and Baldwin go way back: They were a year apart at Juilliard, and more recently, Baldwin directed Urie in the Shakespeare Theater Company’s 2019 production of Hamlet.) His Richard, however smug and occasionally condescending, also manages to evoke some pity.
When the play was last mounted in New York, in 2006 (a Public Theater production slated for the Delacorte in 2020 was ultimately reworked as a radio drama) Baldwin was a member of its cast. (In his review for The New Yorker, Hilton Als called Baldwin’s performance as Thomas Mowbray “captivating.”) Set in vaguely modern times, the show felt to him like a dishy political melodrama. “This is the story of a country being torn apart by the vicious power struggles within the wealthiest families that rule it,” Baldwin says. “In my head it felt like a cinematic psychodrama, in the spirit of Succession.”
For his own adaptation, Baldwin has set the action in Manhattan in the 1980s, reordering some of the text so that when we first meet Richard, he is remembering the recent past from his prison cell.
“I asked myself, what was the prequel to our current moment of American division, greed, and violence?” Baldwin says. The question brought him to the tabloid-fueled, “Greed is Good” 1980s: “Reaganomics, materialism, excess, and aggressive privatization.” He has also made Richard explicitly queer, his community threatened by the specter of the AIDS crisis.
“In some ways, Richard has created his perfect paradise of this queer chosen family, ruling a kingdom, having everything they need,” Urie explains. “And then it gets taken away from him.”
A few years behind Urie and Baldwin at Juilliard was Pascal, who is making her off-Broadway debut. Disarmingly beautiful, she moves easily about the room, alternately strutting across the marked-off “stage” in stilettos (not two weeks earlier, she’d been doing much the same on Chanel’s spring 2026 runway) and affectionately resting her head on a castmate’s shoulder.
She has long admired Urie and speaks effusively of his talent. “It’s just so easy to share the stage with him,” she says. “He’s equally as curious and as open as me.”
Born in California but raised largely in Chile, Pascal—younger sister of actor Pedro Pascal, with whom she’s appeared on several red carpets—had only seen screen adaptations and Spanish-language renditions of Shakespeare before attending Juilliard. “I was very intimidated. I felt isolated while reading it and approaching it,” she says of the Bard’s work. “But then I realized that it is almost a language of its own. And once your voice and your body steps into that language, you’re part of this theatrical and literary world. It took me really living in it to fall in love with the language.”
In preparing for her role as the queen in Richard II, Pascal has been reflecting a lot on her role as Gertrude in a Juilliard production of Hamlet. Like Gertrude, the queen wields a great deal of power very quietly. “She’s in everyone’s mind, you know? She’s a leading part, but she doesn’t speak that much,” Pascal observes. “It’s so rich and complex and so contradictory and so painful to be in this position of self-doubt, like having instincts but having to silence them.”
For Pascal, this Richard II has a lot to say to the present moment. “This play will remind us of the questions we are all asking. What is the purpose of being when there’s so much violence and chaos? And what is the truth? It’s a very existential play—and we’re living in really existential times.”
Richard II is now in previews. Its opening night is set for November 10.