Tony Award nominee. Paralympic runner. As if Katy Sullivan’s bio weren’t impressive enough, she’s about to add another accomplishment when she becomes the first woman with a disability to play the title role in a major U.S. production of Shakespeare’s “Richard III.” Sullivan, who is a bilateral above-knee amputee, leads the cast of Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s upcoming production, which is the first directed by Edward Hall since he became the company’s artistic director in October 2023.
An actress who has worked in theater, television and film, Sullivan originated the role of Ani in Martyna Majok’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Cost of Living,” starring in productions off-Broadway and in Los Angeles and London, the latter directed by Hall. When she reprised the role on Broadway in 2022, she received a Tony nomination for best featured actress in a play.
Although “Richard III” marks her Chicago Shakespeare debut, Sullivan is no stranger to the city. After graduating from Webster University, she followed a mentor’s advice to start her professional career in Chicago’s strong theater community. She worked as an assistant director and casting intern at the Goodman Theatre in 2003 and performed in its 2010 world premiere of “The Long Red Road,” directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman, and appeared in Northlight Theatre’s 2004 production of “Lady Windermere’s Fan.”
Being back in Chicago now “feels like coming home in a lot of ways,” Sullivan told the Tribune in a recent interview. Although she often travels for work, she recently bought a house here with her husband, Scott Aiello, who is also in the cast of “Richard III.” “I made friends that are still here that I’ve reconnected with,” Sullivan said. “It is a community of people that stick around because the work here is so great.”
The opportunity to play Richard III came about after Sullivan and Hall worked together on the 2019 production of “Cost of Living” at London’s Hampstead Theatre, where Hall was then artistic director and joint chief executive. Within the first week of rehearsals, Hall was set on the idea that Sullivan would make a wonderful Richard, and Chicago Shakespeare proved to be the right place and time some five years later. “For me, it’s just wonderful because that doesn’t often happen when you think of somebody and you go, ‘I’ve got to do this play with that person,’ and it actually comes to pass,” Hall said.
Believed to have been written in the early 1590s, “Richard III” is like a cross between “Game of Thrones” and “Succession,” according to Hall. “The play, at its center, is a family drama; that’s what has kept it alive through the centuries,” he said. “And the people in the family are very powerful people; they control the whole country. When you combine a raging fighting family and you give them the power to fight on a scale that goes well beyond any domestic squabbles we’re used to, you get the epic and the domestic all in one heartbeat.”
Shakespeare famously portrays Richard III, who was the last English king to die in battle, as a hunchback. A 2012 archaeological excavation of a parking lot in Leicester, England, revealed the 15th century monarch’s skeleton, which does indeed have a spinal curvature. Shakespeare’s association of physical deformity with villainy was a common device of Elizabethan playwrights, and political bias was also a factor since he was writing during the reign of the Tudor dynasty, which had supplanted Richard’s Plantagenet line.
Sullivan’s experience of living with a disability has helped her relate to Richard, she said. “I walk into a room, and people shift and look and notice, so I understand all of that. I understand what it means to live your life from this place.”
However, while many able-bodied actors have focused on their portrayal of Richard’s disability, Sullivan approaches the role from a position of strength. A four-time 100-meter U.S. champion who finished sixth in the 2012 London Paralympic Games, she spent a lot of time in the gym before rehearsals began to ensure that she was ready for the physicality that she and Hall envisioned for Richard.
“People tend to focus so much on what Richard can’t do instead of what Richard can do,” Sullivan said. “We’ve taken the approach of what Richard can do, and I think that it’s the fact that so many people underestimate what he’s capable of, that he ends up getting where he ultimately gets.”
“It feels like I’m directing a new play, working with (Sullivan) on it,” Hall said. “She keys into so many psychological moments with Richard that are to do with the way the world has treated him, the way the world has related to him — from his mother, right through to people in the street — and how that has brutalized him and changed him as a human being and how honest and open he is with the audience about that. It is a wonderfully complex study of how somebody becomes a villainous murderer — not necessarily a portrait of evil.”
Hall’s production is set in a Victorian sanitarium, where Richard is the principal inmate and surrounded by a chorus of orderlies who play the other roles in his story. It’s a psychological space or dream world that lends itself to various interpretations; perhaps it’s all happening in Richard’s head, or perhaps this is his own version of hell. It’s “a sort of Faustian journey at the beginning,” Hall said, “and you watch his slow descent to hell. And then the next night, he wakes up again and he’s back at the beginning, like ‘Groundhog Day.'”
In his first production as artistic director, Hall hopes that audiences not only have a thrilling, unforgettable time in the theater, but also come away with a more empathetic perspective. “When you walk down the street and you look at people who appear differently to you, (I hope) it just makes you think a little bit more deeply about who they might be and what their experience might be,” he said.
“More than anything, I’m excited to approach this role from a perspective of strength and power,” Sullivan said. “I think the thing that people don’t necessarily realize (because) they focus so much on the fact that he had a disability in his life — (Richard) was a warrior. This man killed a king; that’s how his brother got on the throne. So, the focus on lack, I feel, does this character such a disservice.”
“I want him to feel dangerous,” she concluded. “Not just psychologically dangerous — I want him to feel dangerous in that, at any second, he could snap your neck. And he does.”
“Richard III” plays Feb. 2 to March 3 at Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier, 800 E. Grand Ave.; tickets $38-$92 at chicagoshakes.com or 312-595-5600.
Emily McClanathan is a freelance writer.
