Review: TEENAGE DICK at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

Is it possible that Richard III, had he been beloved by those around him notwithstanding his hunchback, would have abandoned ambition and treachery and instead become a loving and gentle mentor and guardian to Edward V? Would he have gracefully stepped aside when the young King reached his majority, thus ushering in thirty generations of peaceful Yorkish rule?

In short, does the will to power proceed from the house of rejection? Is it any coincidence that of the last twelve American Presidents, nine had highly defective fathers - fathers who were dead (Clinton), or who had severe drinking problems (Johnson, Reagan, Clinton [stepfather]), or who were cold and distant (Nixon, Trump), or abusive (Clinton {stepfather again]), or abandoned their families (Ford, Obama), or who played footsie with the Nazis (George H.W. Bush) , or were Joe Kennedy (Kennedy)?

Consider Richard Gloucester (Gregg Mozgala) - not the 15th-century Monarch but the Secretary of the junior class of Roseland High School and the protagonist of Teenage Dick, Mike Lew's astonishing play getting its area debut at Woolly Mammoth. He is a young intellectual who is challenged with cerebral palsy. He feels his physical challenge keenly, and blames it for his social isolation at Roseland. (No one else wanted the Roseland class Secretary's job.)

So he resolves to change his station in the most dramatic way possible - by winning the election for senior class President against the oafish, cretinous junior class President, Eddie Ivy (Louis Reyes McWilliams). Eddie is the high school quarterback, a marginal student and a bully, and thus, in Richard's view, his precise opposite. Richard will use the principles he learned from Machiavelli's The Prince to accomplish his goal.

He enlists his only friend, Barbara "Buck" Buckingham (Shannon DeVido) to sideline one potential rival, the nauseating Clarissa Duke (Portland Thomas), who seeks to weaponize her evangelical Christianity in order to win the election, and from there a place at Stanford. Then he attempts to win the heart of Eddie's ex, the beautiful and charismatic Anne Margaret (Zurin Villanueva), in order to enhance his own prestige and, perhaps, get some dirt on Eddie.

To raise the stakes, the senior class President has decisive power over the school's discretionary budget, thus engaging the student government's faculty advisor, Elizabeth York (Emily Townley), who hopes to win money for the Drama Department, in Richard's efforts.

Richard III's will to power was monomaniacal, but Richard Gloucester is a more subtle and conflicted creature. He and Anne fall in love, by which I mean that they open their hearts to each other, and love what they discover inside. But does Richard? Or is he only acting, in order to carry out his nefarious scheme? Even Richard doesn't know for sure.

Lew layers this 105-minute one-act with extraordinary complexity and ambiguity. One of the most striking elements is that Richard's palsy affects his gait, but does not otherwise slow him down. (Mozgala, the actor who plays him, also has cerebral palsy). He speaks clearly and when he is late to class - he blames it on his disorder - it is usually because, like his namesake, he is favoring us with fourth-wall-breaking monologues. He gets Anne - a wonderful dancer with professional aspirations - to teach him to dance, and when they show up at the Sadie Hawkins dance Richard shimmies beautifully with Anne. Although Eddie and his brackish friends make fun of Richard's palsy, the thing that really sets him apart from his classmates is his constant resort to Shakespearean tropes and complex language, meant to show his intellectual superiority. Even Buck begs him to knock it off.

Lew's play works only if the artists performing it are capable of a subtlety and complexity which matches the writing. These artists are. Mozgala and DeVido, who were with the production from its beginning, are at every moment their characters, even where the action is far away from them. All of the actors on stage act with their bodies, but DeVido, who uses a wheelchair, acts with her machine as well; the movement of her mechanized device matching the expressions on her face. In Richard III, Buckingham is Richard's loyal minion, but in Teenage Dick, Buck is his truth-telling friend, who is as comfortable in her body, whatever its limitations, as NFL-aspirant Eddie is in his. DeVido nails her.

The idea that a student body President would control a school's budget is the only inauthentic thing in the play, but Emily Townley sells it with such ferocity that it is unlikely that you will notice it until afterward. Ms. York is a frazzled creature, charged with controlling an unruly crowd of teenagers, a task which with justice could be compared to walking into a cage of badly-trained lions. Townley, a local favorite, gets all of it, down to the electrified hairdo.

I particularly liked the performance of McWilliams as Eddie, a seeming lunkhead with a feral instinct for playing to a crowd. Eddie is instinctively cruel and angry, and able to bring out the cruel and angry impulses in the rest of us - another one of the play's well-developed and penetrating insights. (Ms. York decides to allow live-tweeting during a student assembly Presidential debate. You can imagine how that turns out.) But at the same time, he is capable of tenderness, even love. McWilliams needs to make that transition in order to make the character authentic. He does.

For a play with so much tragedy - the program notes, in an effort to stave off catastrophic triggering, warn that there is suicide, violent confrontation, bigoted talk and abortion - there is great wit. DeVido's comic timing, in particular, is brilliant, and gets laughs just by being her character.

But nothing in the play is more authentic than the love scene between Anne and Richard. In Romeo and Juliet, the terms of endearment were pretty generic and outlandish (Shakespeare's point, I think), but here they are heartbreakingly tender and specific. Richard and Anne move from friendship to flirtation, to sexual arousal to reappraisal, and then to deep vulnerability and compassion - the predicate for any successful love, regardless of the age of the lovers. Lew's dialogue is absolutely spot-on, and Villanueva and Mozgala turns the words into flesh.

Habitues of Washington theater may remember a time, twelve years ago, when Arena Stage boldly decided to hold a competition among six young actors to fill the role of "Yolanda" in Crowns. The winner was a senior in the Howard University theater program. Her name was Zurin Villanueva, and you can go to Teenage Dick - now is not too early (it closes October 17)- to see what a wonderful actor, singer and dancer she has become. Long live Howard University! And long live playwrights like Mike Lew, who dare to open the beating heart of ambition, and to see the pain within.

How to Get Tickets

This Woolly Mammoth Theatre production is co-produced with The Huntington Theatre in Boston, MA (Dec 3 - Jan 9) and Pasadena Playhouse in Pasadena, CA (Feb 1 - 27).

Running Time: 105 minutes with no intermission.

Teenage Dick, by Mike Lew. Directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel, assisted by Ashleigh King, who also is the Movement Coordinator. Featuring Gregg Mozgala, Emily Townley, Shannon DeVido, Portland Thomas, Louis Reyes McWilliams, and Zurin Villanueva. Chorographer: Jennifer Weber. Fight Choreographer: Robb Hunter; Scenic design: Wilson Chin, assisted by Riw Rakkulchon; Costume design: Kelsey Hunt; Lighting design: Amith Chandrashaker, assisted by K.A. Rudoph; Casting Director: Judy Bowman, CSA; Stage Manager: Lauren Pekel; produced by Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company.

To post a comment, you must register and login.