Trinity Rep’s Kevin Moriarty discusses his direction techniques for Richard III in the office of the theater’s artistic director Curt Columbus.

When it came time to reacquaint himself with Shakespeare’s Richard III, director Kevin Moriarty bought CDs of the unabridged version to listen to on a long drive. He figured it would take a couple of hours. Three hours and 45 minutes later, the actors stopped talking.

When it was written early in Shakespeare’s career, Richard III, which opens tomorrow in previews at Trinity Rep, was the longest role in the English language theater. It was a ground-breaking star vehicle for famed actor Richard Burbage, for whom Shakespeare later wrote an even longer role, Hamlet.

“It’s a great play to read when you can put it down and have a cup of coffee, look up the words and make a phone call,” said Moriarty. “Most modern audience members like me don’t have that kind of attention span.”

So Moriarty has trimmed a good deal from the play, more than an hour’s worth of material. Most of the cuts are of minor scenes and characters which, said Moriarty, won’t be noticed by anyone but Shakespeare scholars. The one exception is Queen Margaret, who doesn’t appear at all in this production.

Margaret, widow of slain King Henry VI, is an important force in the earlier Henry VI plays. But she is dead by the time of Richard III and therefore wouldn’t figure in the drama. But Shakespeare wanted a voice from the past to serve as a sort of Greek chorus, said Moriarty, someone to deliver highly formal speeches about justice and revenge.

“They are beautifully written,” said Moriarty, “but not relevant to the story. She doesn’t do anything to advance the plot.”

Moriarty has also put together a brief introduction to help the audience better understand what’s going on. The play, in other words, won’t open with the famous monologue, “Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by this son of York.”

The thing about Richard III, which Trinity is staging for the first time in its 43-year history, is that it begins in the middle of a story, one that Elizabethan audiences would have understood but that is unfamiliar to us today. The events in this political thriller were only 100 years old at the time. It would have been like someone writing a play about the aftermath of the American Civil War, said Moriarty. All you’d have to mention is Lincoln’s assassination and the audience would know the background. You wouldn’t have to go into a long, boring review of slavery and the events leading up to the war to talk about what happened.

But when Richard III begins with Edward sitting on the throne and Clarence going to jail, contemporary audiences have no idea what’s happening. People today, said Moriarty, don’t know that there were three brothers and that Edward, the oldest, has become king with the help of the other two, or that Richard is going to trick Edward into sending the middle brother to jail, kill him, and hasten sickly Edward’s death to make way for his own ruthless ascension to the throne.

“Without that kind of basic map,” said Moriarty, “it’s pretty hard to understand what anyone is talking about. So we felt we had to find a way to help the audience get up to speed, assuming that program notes are dry and you can’t depend on people reading them. We thought we had to find a way to theatricalize it.”

So Moriarty has taken several short scenes from Henry VI Part Three, the prequel to Richard III, to fill in the gaps.

“We start at the beginning of the revolution and watch the aftermath of the revolution play out,” said Moriarty.

Moriarty directed Shakespeare’s Richard II when it was done at Trinity a few years ago as part of the so-called Henriad cycle. That production featured Brian McEleney, who is back as Richard III. Moriarty said he and Trinity artistic director Curt Columbus had McEleney in mind from the moment they chose Richard III.

“Brian has an ability that is breathtaking to me to make sense out of dense, complicated language. When I read Shakespeare on the page it takes me forever to figure out exactly what it means. I have to look up words and really piece it together.

“Then I hear Brian say it and I understand it. Very few actors have that ability, and he can do it almost instantly.”

Moriarty, an associate director at Trinity, just took over the Dallas Theater Center, where Trinity founder Adrian Hall was once head. Hall, in fact, was in charge of both Trinity and Dallas at the same time for a while.

The same head-hunting company that conducted the search that brought Columbus to Trinity handled the Dallas search, and in the process of finding a new director for Trinity, company members got to know Moriarty. When they called him last year and asked if he’d be interested in moving to Dallas, he couldn’t resist. The opportunities were too great.

The Dallas Theater Center, which marks its 50th anniversary next season, is constructing a new $275-million theater and opera house designed by Harvard architect Rem Koolhaas. The building, which is due to open in the fall of 2009, is completely mechanized so that it can be transformed from a 700-seat theater with a proscenium stage to an open room that plays in the round. At the same time, Dallas is creating an arts district that is the biggest cultural building project since Lincoln Center, said Moriarty. Five of the structures are by Pritzker Prize-winning architects.

“To be able to come into a city at a time when the arts are expanding, and with a new building, that’s one of those once in a lifetime opportunities,” he said. “It’s really exciting.”

Now Moriarty is back in Providence for a while, spending his mornings e-mailing Dallas and sitting in on conference calls. Afternoons have been spent rehearsing Shakespeare.

Moriarty sees obvious parallels between Richard III and contemporary politics as we pick our next leader. Elizabethans were facing the same issues. When Shakespeare wrote Richard III, Queen Elizabeth was a popular leader, but nearing the end of her life. There was a great anxiety over who would succeed her. Would a tyrant emerge, and if so, would it be possible to stop him?

“The play taps into that zeitgeist,” said Moriarty, “and as such it was a massive hit. Not only was it performed extensively in London, it was published more than any other play in Shakespeare’s lifetime.”

Part of the allure of Richard is that he is such a seductive villain, a sort of Tony Soprano type we can’t help but root for on some level. He is also funny, at least in the first act, before his psychological undoing and before the house of cards he has constructed comes tumbling down. Part of what makes Richard comical, said Moriarty, is his duplicitousness.

“He can play every side of every deal. He can say to his brother, who is in jail, ‘I would do anything to get you out,’ and start crying he is so moved. And then he turns to the audience and says, ‘I’m the one who sent him there, he just doesn’t know it, and I hope he dies.’ And then he can burst into his other brother’s court and say to the queen, ‘It’s all your fault my brother’s in jail. I’m so offended.’

“He’s able to be righteous. He’s able to be vulnerable. He’s able to be the best possible leader, except that it’s all lies.”

Richard III is being staged in Trinity’s upstairs theater amid an abstract set that looks like precarious slabs of faux concrete, the remnants of a century of civil strife that followed the killing of Richard II. The set allows for different scenes to overlap and keep the action moving, and allows cast members to drag all those dead bodies off stage, without having the play grind to a halt.

In the original play, only two characters die on stage, Clarence and Richard. But in this often violent production all the other characters who are killed are shot in front of the audience. Guns are used instead of swords in this updated version.

“We just wanted to do an entertaining play,” said Moriarty. “I figured for Merry Wives of Windsor it was good to have a lot of pies. If you’re going to do a comedy, you should have a pie fight. If you’re going to do a tragedy, it’s good to shoot a lot of people.”

Richard III opens tomorrow in previews and runs through March 2 at Trinity Rep, 201 Washington St., Providence. Tickets are $20-$60, and $10 for the bench at the rear of the theater. Call (401) 351-4242 or visit wwwtrinityrep.com.

cgray@projo.com