The Theater: Black Spider's Web

RICHARD III

by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Richard III is like those horror stories that children tell to frighten each other. It is not one of Shakespeare's great plays; yet it has the power to grip an audience. Apparently, mankind's appetite for a total monster is insatiable.

Richard, played by Michael Moriarty, is steeped in evil. To seize the crown of England he murders, or has his agents murder, some half a dozen people, including the two boy princes royal who are smothered in the Tower of London. Over the coffin bearing the dead father-in-law of Lady Anne (Marsha Mason), Richard woos and wins her, despite the fact that he had killed both the father-in-law and her husband. Although he is a lump of deformity with a hunched back and a withered arm, Richard must have the power to attract as well as repel.

Moriarty, who won acclaim in the baseball film Bang the Drum Slowly and captured last season's Tony Award for his portrayal of a homosexual prostitute in Find Your Way Home, is an actor who conceptualizes a role. One can scarcely imagine him on a horse. But he is a spider of infinite guile and smarmy villainy. Moriarty has an uncanny capacity to disturb. It is part of his stage presence and power. One feels that others do his bidding because they are terribly afraid not to. Before achieving the throne he seems neurasthenically preoccupied, but at his coronation he is as playful as a youngster with a shiny new toy. This is one of several psychological effects subtly managed by Moriarty.

The entire production at Manhattan's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater is laudable in its clarity and lack of gimmickry. The spare, pillared set of Santo Loquasto is a marvel of economy, and the tasteful costumes of John Conklin never distract from Shakespeare's lines, an unmixed blessing, considering who wrote them.

E. Kalem