As the audience takes its seats around the Shakespeare Theater’s Courtyard thrust stage, wraiths in black gowns and white masks silently infiltrate the aisles, imparting an air of menace and suspense about what will unfold as we near the opening of “Richard III.” Soon enough, they take to the stage, where mounds of skulls deck the bottom of industrial scaffolding, a surgical partition concealing the center of the stage. The wraiths whisk away the shield, revealing Richard III (Kaity Sullivan).

“Now is the winter of our discontent,” Richard cries, and declares an intention to recapture the throne, and sets the play in motion. In this production, director Director Edward Hall has cast as Richard III the Tony-nominee Sullivan, an athletic paraplegic who plays powerfully from a wood captains chair on wheels, and her infirmity seamlessly substitutes for that of the famously hunchbacked and deformed king, “so lamely and unfashionable that dogs bark at me.”

This is Hall’s first production as the successor to founder and long-time artistic director Barbara Gaines, who in 2023 retired after 36 remarkable years. And Hall’s production of Richard III shows we have an outstanding new talent on a premiere Chicago stage. The core of a successful Shakespeare is the language, and when the delivery is right, the bard’s Elizabethan language arrives with clarity on the audience’s ears. Hall brings us something more, too. The nuance inherent in the lines is brought forth with exquisite timing—benefitting passages of dark humor, threat, and the starkest evil as Richard III plots through murder and marriage to capture the throne.

This is not Shakespeare dressed up in contemporary, ill-fitting trappings. Any anachronistic elements—body bags, guns, chain saws—are purposeful and instantly resonate. Those ghoulish wraiths form a corps of murderous henchmen, carrying out the grisly killings of those who stand in the way of Richard’s path to the crown. Often the murders are backlit and done behind the screens, with silhouettes and bloody showers indirectly visible to the audience, making them truly horrific. As a sickle blade eviscerates George, the Duke of Clarence (Scott Aiello), we see it from behind, and his entrails are dropped over the screen into a bucket, signifying his end. Wow!

Music underscores a number of scenes, and particularly powerful are Gregorian and other melodious chants by Richard’s minions—suggesting an effort to confer weight and worthiness on this violent pretender to the throne who seeks the endorsement of the populace, using manipulative tactics and positioning familiar to anyone watching politics today.
In Act 3 Scene 7, for example,we hear the Duke of Buckingham (Yao Dogbe) report to Richard on efforts to talk him up at a public meeting, where he sought a call to the throne by popular demand:

Buckingham: I bid them that did love their country’s good cry “God save Richard, England’s royal king!”
Richard: And did they so?
Buckingham: No. So God help me, they spake not a word. But, like dumb statues or breathing stones, stared at each other . . . .

So Buckingham suggests a different tack, in which he will bring the officials to “discover” RIchard deeply in prayer, and charges Sir William Catesby (Anatasha Blakely) to act as a shill and beg Richard to take the throne, to which he will at first resist, then reluctantly accept.

Mayor: Do, good my lord. Your citizens entreat you.
Buckingham: Refuse not, mighty lord, this proffered love.

At last comes Sir William Catesby (Anatasha Blakely), entreating RIchard to accept the crown, but delivering the line in a broad Chicago accent, full of knowing irony and a wink: “O, make them joyful. Grant their lawful suit.” The moment is pricelessn as the scene plays out like something out of the storied tales of Chicago’s City Hall pols. And like Napoleon, Richard crowns himself,

Though this is Shakespeare’s second longest play, the performance speeds by, and I was surprised to find the hour when I got back to my car. Highly recommended, “Richard III” runs through March 3 at Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier.