[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: Citysong]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Hey, it's almost Thanksgiving, which means media outlets are publishing gift guides and the algorithm is feeding you all kinds of things to buy. We here at All Of It like to shop local. Next week, we'll be kicking off a series of conversations with Caroline Weaver. She's a shop owner herself, as well as the founder of The Locavore Guide.

She's joining us to talk about how to spend your money in a way that is meaningful and keeps it in the community. She'll share some recommendations in all five boroughs, and we want yours as well. Starting Monday, get ready to call in and tell us your favorite place to buy gifts. That is happening in the future. Now let's take a trip back to 1980s New York and the setting for Richard II.

[MUSIC - Eurythmics: Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)]

A new off-Broadway production of Richard II takes place in 1980s Manhattan, full of pastel colors, mullets, and boxy suits. No worries, though, it's the traditional text, just with shoulder pads. It's about a vain king who likes being kingy, played by actor Michael Urie. He's at odds with his moral cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, played by my other guest, Grantham Coleman.

Richard gets a bit greedy and takes Bolingbroke's title and inheritance and exiles him from England for six years. However, his pursuit of the crown comes at a devastating cost and quite a bit of drama. Richard II is now running at the Astor Place Theatre on Lafayette Street through Sunday, December 14th. Joining me now are two of the show's stars, Michael Urie. Nice to talk to you.

Michael Urie: You too. Thank you.

Alison Stewart: Also, Grantham Coleman. It's nice to welcome you back to WNYC.

Grantham Coleman: Love to be here. Tell me, when was the first time, Michael, that you ever heard of Richard II? When did you read it?

Michael Urie: I saw a production of it when I was at Juilliard. I was a second year at Juilliard, and the fourth-year class was doing it. Lee Pace, the great actor Lee Pace, was playing Richard. It was a great, very traditional production. Very Juilliard. [laughter]

Alison Stewart: Capital J.

Michael Urie: Very good. He was really, really good. I said, "I want to do that." I think a lot of-- this has happened to me a few times, where I've seen a great actor play, especially a Shakespeare role, and it cracks it open for me. I say, "Oh, I see it, and I want it, and I'm going to steal, and then I'm going to make it my own." It took 20 years, but I got somebody; I finally talked someone into doing it.

Alison Stewart: Grantham, when was the first time you read Richard II?

Grantham Coleman: The first time I actually read it was maybe a few months ago.

Alison Stewart: Really?

Grantham Coleman: It was not done when I was at school, when I was at Juilliard. We didn't see it. It wasn't the play that they really taught from. I've heard a lot of the speeches before. Growing up, I was like a Hamlet guy, Romeo and Juliet, Mackers, all those, like the histories were foreign to me. Every time I would see a history play, I would have that immediate response of like, "Oh, we're going to do this medieval style. As a consumer of classical texts, I love it. I always felt distant from it.

Richard II that we're doing, I love because it kind of, like you said, cracks it open in a new way so that it's more accessible. We're having a blast. Yes, Richard II, I've seen it only once. It was in San Diego. Robert Sheldon Leonard did a beautiful job, beautiful job. I was like, "Oh, yes, this is a history play." Going to work on it, I was like, "Oh, there's so much more here than just English history."

Alison Stewart: Now, both of you went to Juilliard, yes?

Grantham Coleman: Yes.

Michael Urie: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What is something from that experience that you thought of during the play that you bring with you to Richard II? It doesn't necessarily have to be about Richard II, but something from your training that you use all the time.

Grantham Coleman: Oh, gosh. Like all of it. The bulk of the training, all of it, I'm a guy without a history. [laughter] The bulk of the training is to do Shakespeare. It's to prepare you to do Shakespeare, the theory being that if you can do Shakespeare, you could do anything. This is a very challenging play, huge text. We both have very big parts, lots to say. Shakespeare works best when it's embodied physically. It's not meant to be read. It's meant to be acted. It's meant to be spoken.

That's why everyone who reads it and gets bored doesn't want to go see it. The truth is, if you listen to it or watch it, it's way more exciting. When you're an actor who's lucky enough to get cast in Shakespeare plays, embodying it is extremely thrilling. Specifically, Robert Neff Williams is this teacher we had at Julliard. He's no longer with us, but he assigned me one of the Richard II speeches, and I worked on it with him. He gave me some very specific stuff that I do still-

Alison Stewart: Oh, interesting.

Grantham Coleman: -in the play. It's the hollow crown speech, where he talks about how death sits within the hollow crown of a king and keeps his court, and then eventually, with a little pin, bores through his castle wall. I remember very vividly, Neff, we called him, saying, "And why don't you just pick up the pin and bore through the castle wall and kill yourself right then and there?" In the moment, I always do it. Every night, I pick up a pin, he says, "Bores through his castle wall, and farewell, king." The castle wall is the crown, and I do all of it. I do everything he told me to do. I think of him every night. It's a very special memory.

Alison Stewart: What do you remember from Julliard that you use every night?

Grantham Coleman: I completely agree with everything you said, but I would just boil it down to dexterity. I feel like a lot of our early classes in the first couple of years are about giving everyone a palette to pick from and options to choose. There's numerous ways to say words, but there was definitely something to be beaten into us. Like, this is the right way to say this word. As monotonous as it could be, practicing schwoz for half an hour with a compact mirror in front of your mouth going, ah, ah, ah.

It works, because eventually, your mouth gets so used to the tool and instrument that it is and what it can do with these words that then your body is able to meet what your mouth is doing when you speak Shakespeare. Which is why I love seeing American actors do Shakespeare, because we tend to inhabit the words physically and literally in a way that is definitely my cup of tea. Watching Michael work every night is a joy, because I get the best seat in the house. I'm this close to him.

Michael Urie: Oh, my gosh. Ditto.

Alison Stewart: You spent weeks reading and doing table reads for this play. Why was that important to you, and what was something you figured out about your character?

Grantham Coleman: Well, it's so vital to spend time together with the text at a table, because we have to be on the same page about what everyone's saying. It's sometimes really, really complicated. Our director, Craig Baldwin, knows this play inside and out. No, so do we. He knew it on day one, which was very valuable. If ever any of us were even a little bit unclear about what we were saying or what someone else was saying, he would know. That was great. For example, I speak a lot. Grantham speaks a lot. We speak a lot. Other characters have to listen to us. It's very important for them to know what we're saying, too, because their reactions to what we're saying will help the audience.

Alison Stewart: Interesting.

Grantham Coleman: An audience is not just going to understand what we're saying right off the bat, necessarily. If they see the way it lands on the other character, it will help them. It'll give them the context clues of what's going on in the moment. It's not only important for the person speaking to know what's being said. It's important for all the actors on stage to know, too.

Alison Stewart: My guests are actors Michael Urie and Grantham Coleman. We're talking about the new production of Richard II. It's set in 1980s Manhattan. It's running at the Astor Place Theatre through Sunday, December 14th. What did you think, Grantham, when you heard the setting was going to be 1980s Manhattan?

Grantham Coleman: Oh, that's a question that's still on my mind every day. As you were saying about table work, the other half of what we spent our time doing for the first week of rehearsal at the table, and then multiple weeks after, is trying to marry the two worlds. Trying to meet the text with what it says and who these people are and like kings. Okay, we don't have kings in 1980s New York, but we do. We have the equivalent. All right, a court. We don't have a court, but we do.

Making the extrapolations and having these group huddle sessions and asking Craig, our director, like, "Do we still have gloves that we throw on the ground, like, in the 1980s?" What we do. We make a lot of the marriages work. The 1980s, for me, I think it was more of a time where you did have some Black figures stepping up and being in the frontal face of the society, but not necessarily as a civil rights leader. We had businessmen. We had other figures to see and look at for. To me, the first time in movies, Eddie Murphy had a No. 1 song, a No. 1 movie. That hadn't happened before.

Alison Stewart: Yes, you look like Billy Dee Williams in your suit.

Grantham Coleman: Thank you. That is who I went for. That is who the wig is supposed to be. That is it. I get a lot of Al Sharptons, but the wig is supposed to be Billy Dee. That is exactly what I was going for.

Michael Urie: I'm so glad that moment happened. He does talk about Billy Dee a lot.

Grantham Coleman: The man epitomizes cool. He is cool. Yes, the 1980s-- Craig said a beautiful thing one day. He was like, "We cast this play because everyone is who they are, and you can't leave yourself behind when you walk on stage." As actors, we are ourselves, and we try to bring more than ourselves to roles and use the pieces of us that fit. Being a Black man in our story in the 1980s, we're like, "Yes, we're cousins."

Okay, that's acceptable. Many families look many ways.

We're also kings and princes, and okay, well, what does a Black prince in the 1980s look like? I was like, Billy Dee Williams. Let's do Billy Dee Williams. It shaped and informed a lot of the choices that everyone made by trying to put our bodies in the space together.

Alison Stewart: A lot of this play is about what's mine is mine or what was yours is now mine, as far as you're concerned, Michael. What felt particularly '80s about this script?

Michael Urie: Well, part of it is that the '80s, in many ways, was the beginning of Greed is Good, was the beginning of where we are now. It was sort of set the stage. Richard II is the beginning of The War of the Roses, Shakespeare's history cycle, The War of the Roses. Craig really liked the idea of putting it at the beginning of our War of the Roses, where we are, like, where we've ended up. Now we have like a potential trillionaire. Where did that begin? Was it the Wall Street era when Wall Street sort of began? I also think our production is very queer.

Our King Richard is a very queer character. He has created this inner circle, which is in the play, of flatterers, hangers-on. At one point, Grantham's character calls them the caterpillars of the Commonwealth. In our play, they're very queer. The rest of the court does not like them. The rest of the country they do not like that these people are influencing Richard so much. The '80s was a breaking point for queer people for a lot of reasons. The AIDS crisis, obviously, which we do not address in our play.

That was a point where, suddenly, queer people who had been enjoying many freedoms lost them. I think a lot of influential queer people, I'm thinking about on one end of the spectrum, Roy Cohn, on another, Halston. A brilliant, famous, closeted, but pretty queer celebrity who had beautiful women on his arm, but also this secret life that was kind of a secret, kind of not. His bubble burst. I think that where we meet Richard and his court, it's the end of this little paradise that they've created. This amazing kingdom of queer royalty. The bubble gets burst because the rest of the kingdom doesn't like that. They don't like the way they're running things.

Alison Stewart: I thought it was a pretty sexy play. Actually, if you want to know the truth. I was like, "What do you think of sexuality in the play?"

Michael Urie: Well, I think it was very important to all of us that this is a man who doesn't fear anyone. He has his fears, but he's all-powerful. He's the king. If anyone is going to explore their sexuality, it's a king. He does. He's got a lot of interests. He's surrounded by the people that he's chosen the most fabulous queen he can. He also has a boyfriend. That is very supported in the text. It's not explicit in Shakespeare's text that he has lovers with this character of Aumerle.

Aumerle is loyal to the end and is often referred to as the king's friend in sort of quotes. I think there's a beautiful passage where basically the jig is up. It's all going to go away. They see the writing on the wall. Richard says to Aumerle, "Should we just let our tears dig us holes in the ground and be buried together?" It's quite beautiful. Whether or not Shakespeare's audience saw them as lovers, that's the thing you say to a lover.

Alison Stewart: Grantham, in the beginning of the play, we're introduced to Henry Bolingbroke as the king's cousin who publicly accuses another nobleman of treason and leads this big Russian roulette shooting duel. What's at stake for your character in that moment?

Grantham Coleman: So much. As the story goes, the person that I'm accusing is complicit. Through accusing that person, I am also accusing the king that sits to my left over here, Mr. Michael Urie, but also King Richard. As in the history, apparently Richard did kill his uncle, Gloucester. Mowbray may have been involved historically. He may not have. Shakespeare, who wrote this play 200 years after that had happened, so it was already a little bit of a Netflix special for the medieval people. [laughter] He was giving them the crown.

He makes it pretty well known in our play that Richard has hired Mowbray, who is now the Duke of Norfolk, which in our story we chose to make a very recent thing. Like last week he was just Thomas Mowbray, and now he's the Duke of Norfolk and our uncle's dead. How did that happen? There's a lot of high-stakes gambling going on with Northumberland and myself by accusing Mowbray, knowing that in some way it is also coming at the king.

If at any point Mowbray is like, "You know what, I can't take the heat. I'll just admit what happens." Then we may have a reason to outwardly revolt. Yes, I don't know. It was a very hard thing to wrap my head around because today's deposition is very much different than what it means to depose someone back then as a king. I think this might have been one of the first plays that dealt with actually deposing a king because that was probably something you were not allowed to write about when there were kings and queens.

Michael Urie: Right, and wasn't it that when the queen saw this play she said, "You're talking about me here." There was something like, it was dangerous for Shakespeare to write about these, that's why he was telling old stories.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting because I pulled out my book from college to look at Richard II. Yours starts with you in jail. It doesn't start that way originally. You're on stage before, as the audience is settling in this box. First of all, what are you thinking about in that moment? Are you in character? Are you getting in character? What's going on?

Michael Urie: I'm both getting in character and in character. There's definitely a part of me that's listening to the audience and wondering what they're thinking. I can't really hear them, but it's more of a din. Sometimes when I walk out, because I'm not there from the very beginning, depending on when you come into the theater. Sometimes I go out there, and then they all get quiet like it's starting, and that's annoying. This framing device that we use of Richard in prison I think, is really effective because he doesn't go to jail until Act V.

In our play, that's where we meet him, and then he's remembering. It's become a memory play. He's remembering everything that happened to him, and then he's filling in the gaps when he doesn't know. It's sort of his imagines. I think that's what would have happened. I think that's what would have happened. It's very cool for me as an actor to get to go through all that and get to build. I sort of play two Richards. I play the guy in the story and the guy remembering the story.

When I'm in the box, to answer your question about what am I thinking about, my first line is, I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world. I'm really like trying to do that. That's what I spend the pre-show doing, is how is this where I am now like the world I was in and the world that everyone else is in? There's this beautiful idea of becoming nothing that's throughout the play that once you are no longer a king, you're not anything. You don't have a name. You don't get to keep anything.

You are nothing. This idea that until you are pleased with that, until you're at peace with that, you will never be a settled spirit. Your soul will never settle. That's my big journey is that's the question I pose to myself in the cell when we first start the play. That's what I'm trying to get to by reliving the events is becoming at peace with it so that I can go and maybe get to heaven and no longer have to endure this.

Alison Stewart: This is a practical question, Grantham. It's about two and a half hours long with an intermission. How do you keep your stamina up for that long?

Grantham Coleman: Oh, that's a better question for Michael. I was thinking about it all the time because he is on stage the whole time.

Alison Stewart: You are on him. Yes, you are.

Grantham Coleman: It's always a fun challenge as an actor to do a play when you do it. The one time I did it, I was like, "This was a mistake. I should not have done this. [laughter] I should not have signed on for this." Your bladder must be incredible, and you have incredible control. I can't imagine it myself. In terms of how I keep the stamina, it's--

Alison Stewart: You go out, but you come back like sort of looking like a Black Panther.

Grantham Coleman: Yes, yes, yes. I gather a lot of it from the people on stage. There's wild and crazy tunnels back there in that theater. You can easily find yourself in a small room going like, "What's happening on stage right now?" When you do find out, it's your time to go on. You go out and you see Michael, and he's just giving you the business, making you feel like the worst guy ever. Then you realize, "Wait a minute, you did this to me. You took my land. You took my title. You basically killed my dad. Then now you're sad that I'm here," and it just reinvigorates every single cell in my body.

It's one of my favorite roles, which I did not know was going to happen. I remember every day of rehearsal being like, "Michael, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know who this guy is." Then I realized, like, oh, well, basically, people tell you who you are in real life and in the text and in acting. His character and all the people around me in the show tell me who I am. I stopped trying to find who Bolingbroke was, and I just went with like, "Oh, I'm the person that you're telling me I am. Thank you."

Alison Stewart: Well, how do you keep your stamina up?

Michael Urie: Well, it's tricky because I can't drink a lot of water. When you do a play, you drink a lot of water. I can't because then I'll have to go pee. I can't. It's the other people. This is a really good cast.

Alison Stewart: It's a great cast.

Michael Urie: Oh my gosh. Every time somebody new comes out, and I get to watch them every night and I'm very inspired by them. To have a foil like Grantham, we're so different, but also we come from the same training program, and we both think about this, I think, in very similar ways. We both really love Shakespeare. It's the other people that keep me, and the audience, of course, like an audience is always going to keep you energized.

Alison Stewart: When I was there, one of your co-workers from Shrinking was in the audience.

Michael Urie: Ted McGinley.

Alison Stewart: Oh, you said his name. I was going to give him his anonymity. [laughter] Somebody else was in the audience.

Michael Urie: Sorry, sorry.

Alison Stewart: You just did it. Well, how does it feel when someone you work with regularly in another situation sees you in this situation?

Michael Urie: Oh, well, I actually didn't know he was there until after. He surprised me. That performance there was a bunch of students from Juilliard also.

Alison Stewart: Really?

Michael Urie: Yes. You got a good one because we were all very excited to have Juilliard in the house. When I found out he was there, I was very touched that he came. Also, I was very excited that-- honestly, I was really glad someone from Shrinking saw the show because I'm so proud of what we've done. I'm so proud of what we made. It's so different than Shrinking. He'll go tell everyone that we did a good job and that we've made something really cool.

Alison Stewart: Be nice to McCrafty next time.

Michael Urie: Yes, exactly. I love that. I'm so lucky that I get to do such very different things with these two projects and that is not lost on me. I feel the same way when one of my cast members brings up Shrinking, it's like, "Oh, you watch that show? That's so cool."

Alison Stewart: All right. What is the next Shakespeare play you would like to be in? Grantham.

Grantham Coleman: I've always thought I have a Henry V in me.

Alison Stewart: Henry V?

Grantham Coleman: Yes. I think because that was the history that I actually was like, "Oh yes, this is like the other place. This has a really cool character. It's really cool stuff happening. It's some really cool speeches." I think in like the five roles that I've always wanted to do it's the last one that's still there. Yes, maybe Henry V.

Alison Stewart: What do you think, Urie?

Michael Urie: Well, I had a plan to pitch Grantham on doing Othello and Iago together, but then I found out Grantham wants to play Iago.

Grantham Coleman: Yes. [laughter]

Michael Urie: That plan was dashed.

Alison Stewart: Who else do you want to play?

Michael Urie: Well, I really want to play Benedick in Much Ado. I'd love to play Bottom in Midsummer. There's a lot. I have a long list. I have Bottom in Midsummer. I want to play Leontes in The Winter's Tale. I wouldn't mind revisiting a few roles. I got to play Hamlet. That'd be a fun one to do it. That's always a good one. I'm a little old. I could play an old Mercutio, which I've done before. There's a lot. It's an amazing canon of work. I want to do it all. Whenever I'm doing Shakespeare, I think this is all I want to do, but it's hard to get cast in them all the time.

Alison Stewart: You'll find a way.

Michael Urie: Yes.

Alison Stewart: My guests have been Michael Urie and Grantham Coleman. [laughter] We're talking about Richard II, which is set at the Astor Place Theater through Sunday, December 14th. Thank you for coming in.

Michael Urie: Thank you.

Grantham Coleman: Lovely to be here.