The pursuit of power leads to dark places when Shakespeare meets Mean Girls in Teenage Dick

The contemporary take on Shakespeare’s Richard III centres on Roseland High School student Richard Gloucester.

Teenage Dick

When: Feb. 9-March 5

Where: Newmont Stage at BMO Theatre Centre, 162 West 1st Ave., Vancouver

Tickets: From $25 at artsclub.com

It was love at the first few pages when Ashlie Corcoran began reading Mike Lew’s Teenage Dick.

“It was around 11 o’clock and I was getting into bed,” said the Arts Club artistic director. “I thought I would fall asleep after a couple pages, but I stayed up until one. Right away, I developed an intense crush — there are no other words to describe it — on this script.”

The contemporary take on Shakespeare’s Richard III centres on Roseland High School student Richard Gloucester. Teased for his cerebral palsy — and Shakespearean way of speaking — he decides to pursue power in the darkest way possible: politics. His run for senior class president leads him to make some dark choices.

“I love plays that surprise an audience and take it on a journey,” Corcoran said. “This play sets us up right from the beginning to understand that we are seeing an adaptation of Richard III set in a high school. It’s Richard III meets Mean Girls, and that feels so funny and fun and clever, right off the top.”

The play’s humour lies “inside of the language that the characters use. I really love the mashup of quite sophisticated Shakespearean language with real teenage slang. And Mike’s got a really irreverent way of looking at the world, very sly, very funny. But you also really feel for the characters in his play, which I love.”

Teenage Dick also plays on the tropes of high school movies. “And so there is a teacher in this play, and her way of trying to understand and relate to the teenagers is quite funny and true and recognizable.”

As the story progresses, playwright Lew veers away from the actual plot points of the Shakespeare play while maintaining the feel.

“It’s the same structure, where the tidiness at the beginning starts to disintegrate and the play become more impressionistic, more metaphorical, and more theatrical,” Corcoran said. “And Mike has done the same thing with his play, shifting the form in that way.”

Teenage Dick is also “an examination of disability and ableism and the perceptions of able-bodied people of people with disabilities.”

To play Richard Gloucester, Corcoran enlisted Christopher Imbrosciano. She knew the actor, who has cerebral palsy himself, from his performance as CP-stricken grad student John in the Arts Club’s 2019 production of Martyna Majok’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Cost of Living. Other cast members include Jennifer Lines as the teacher Elizabeth Yorick, Elizabeth Barrett, Cassandra Consiglio, Marco Walker-Ng, and Cadence Rush Quibell.

Quibell, whom Corcoran calls “a stage animal,” plays Barbara “Buck” Buckingham, the play’s other differently abled character.

“By including both Buck and Richard, who are very different from each other, Mike is saying there isn’t just one way that a person with a disability would be looking at and existing in this school and this community.”

Quibell is a member of Realwheels Acting Academy, a production partner along with Bard On The Beach. Realwheels focuses on disability arts in the Lower Mainland. Corcoran is directing the play with assistant director Jennifer Burgmann, who is, like Quibell, a wheelchair user. The Arts Club is also working with an accessibility coordinator, Amy Amantea, on the play and several associated events.

A creator/performer who lives with legal blindness, neurodiversity, chronic illness, and pain, Amantea will host the Arts Club’s Crip Cabaret: A Reclamation! The Feb. 26 event features performers from the disability community showcasing their talent through song, poetry, monologues, and more. At the Disability Artists Market, which will be held during select performances of Teenage Dick in the Newmont Stage atrium, five local artists who live with various disabilities will exhibit their artwork. A Relaxed Performance will be held March 4.