So well known, and perhaps true, is the old adage “There are no small parts, only small actors” that playwright Kanika Asavari Vaish, a graduate of Columbia’s Playwriting program, decided to write a whole play about it. About that very idea. After a COVID-induced introduction to the SoHo Shakespeare Company, where Vaish worked on a production of Rajiv Joseph’s Guard At The Taj, a relationship between this writer and a company began to form, where she went on to work on a production of Richard III. So captivated was Vaish by this play, that she started to imagine an entire adaptation based entirely around the play’s two most fleeting characters, the murderers. Both the smallest and most consequential roles of the play, Shakespeare’s two murders exist to carry and physicalize Richard’s brutality. What would it mean to create a larger world for theatre onto these characters? What would the context of this world look like? Vaish chose the cutthroat world of New York theatre where the mere shot at getting onstage outweighs the length of the stay. 2nd Murder is a meta-theatrical adaptation that seems to both push and question the potential of theatrical form. What happens when the responsibility of a role becomes real? I spoke to Vaish and her director and collaborator Frankie DiCiaccio earlier this month, interestingly on No Kings Day, about their collaborative relationship, the life of this play, writing in a rehearsal room, and the great power of joy.
This interview has been edited for both length and clarity.
Eve Bromberg: Can you both give a summary of the play?
Frankie DiCiaccio: This play is about a production of Richard III. Specifically, the play follows the actor playing the second murderer of that production. Part way through, we learn that the lead that we’re paying attention to is surrounded by an ensemble that we also seem to be paying attention to, and we fall into an unexpected world. I want to leave it there, because I don’t want to say too much. It’s a tricky one.
Kanika Asavari Vaish: I might add that it’s a play that’s made by theatre people, in a sense for theatre people, but also everyone! Theatre people were my muse. It’s a play about being an artist, and a struggling artist. And by struggling artists, I mean the difficulty of pursuing art in a capitalist world, but also the struggle of creating at all. As artists, we feel everything on a deeper level. Things tend to affect us profoundly. We see these difficulties in every character, but especially through The Second Murderer, whose name is Murph. It’s also about the fantasies we create in attempting to cope with the difficulty of this, perhaps excessive, sensitivity.
EB: I have some idea of where this idea came from, but can you talk about both the origins of this production, how it fits into SoHo Shakespeare’s programming, and the decision to contextualize this adaptation in the theatre world of New York City?
KAV: My introduction to SoHo Shakes happened through Shawn K. Jain, the actor who’s playing Dick/Richard in our production. In 2020, the company live streamed a production of Rajiv Joseph’s Guard At The Taj, which Shawn spearheaded. Shawn, who went to Harvard’s ART program, along with Frankie and Alex Pepperman, the artistic director of SoHo Shakes, introduced me to the company in 2020. In 2022, Alex reached out to me about a production of Richard III, asking if I wanted to associate direct. I’d never read the play before and I only vaguely knew what it was about, but reading it I was deeply touched by the two characters of the murderers. I kept jokingly commenting that they needed their own story. Alex told me if I wrote it, the company would put it on. So it wasn’t quite a commission, but it was an idea that’d been nurtured for a few years and then developed within the company. Our first reading was during the Summer of 2024, and then we had a few readings after that. It’s been in process for a while.
SoHo Shakes’ mission is to tell classic stories from an unexpected and untold perspective. In Alex’s production of Richard III, he created a silent character, young Richard, who spends the play watching his older self go through his reign. This additional character is just there, stewing in the background for a lot of the action. The idea of highlighting two minor characters – they only appear in a singular scene in Shakespeare’s play [Act I, Sc 4] – felt like it fit into the mission quite nicely. That was my approach to altering perspective.
I decided to set the play in New York to represent the reality of acting as a profession. These characters are tasked with something so consequential, and yet they only appear briefly. Which to me felt very much like the reality of being an actor, what actors and artists feel in New York City; you have five minutes on stage and you must make the most of it. By contextualizing these characters by both location and profession, I felt I could get the audience to feel the stakes of these characters’ role within the play
EB: How is it that the two of you ended up collaborating and what were the early conversations about directing like?
KAV: Frankie boldly joined the show a bit into the process after our initial director had to bow out. When Alex and I were searching for the right person to direct the show, we wanted it to be someone who had experience working with ensembles given how ensemble-heavy this play is. I also wanted to work with someone who would bring and preserve joy into a room. Alex knows Frankie from graduate school, and though I didn’t know him, Alex assured me they were the right person for the job. They happened to be coming to New York for a teaching contract anyway, and so the dates lined up perfectly. I feel so confidently that Frankie is the right person for this job. The world of this play is so bizarre and Frankie really leaned into that. It was the best thing I could’ve asked for.
FC: I’m teaching at Wagner College this semester. It was such a fated thing, because, you know, so much of being an artist is that it’s boom and bust, which the play represents beautifully. It was one of those rare moments where I could actually do the project! Around mid-August, Kanika and I had our first conversations. I think back to those days, and I remember things like wanting to find places where we could make cuts and making sure I got them right. Kanika had so much material amassed over years of workshopping and from dreaming up this world, which is really specific and bizarre. The questions started to become about length. Is this a four hour play, or are we going to make it shorter? Cutting a script is such an interesting process, because you move one thing and 12 other things move along with it. And I haven’t really had the pleasure of working with a living artist on a debut production like this since college, so many of those early conversations were about where we were headed. I remember looking at Kanika, maybe a month ago, and telling her she has a spine of steel, because the room was so open and Kanika was so approachable with thoughts, feedback, and questions. The process has turned out to be incredibly collaborative and warm which made the room feel so warm. We’d be in a rehearsal and someone would ask if we could try something, which Kanika was always game for. Our rewrites were a response to Kanika being in the room and answering questions. She was such a resource.
KAV: Frankie is such an intricate part of this story. I have found that I am the kind of artist who does her best work in the room with other people, which is also why I enjoy directing. It’s very hard for me, as a writer, to be alone in a room. Writing as a solitary activity is hard for me. I’m not able to sit and meditate and write 10 pages a day like a “normal” writer might. I have these bursts of writing, usually approaching a deadline. I desperately want to write, I just need something to push me along to get the insecure voice out of my head so the artist voice, my artist voice, can be louder. That only happens when I’m stressed on time. I write quite easily once I’m in the rehearsal room and I don’t think I could do this with just anyone. Frankie is a really incredible collaborator. When I didn’t have the ending finished, he reassured me by telling me we could write it in the room. The play went through a lot of different versions. Everyone involved in the world premiere of this play is so embedded in the very text. I told the whole cast and crew that on opening night.
FC: It was like one of those R.L. Stein books where you could choose your own ending. It was really thrilling.
EB: Where does this production fit into your larger body of work? Do you both have an invested interest in adaptation, or particular interest in Shakespeare, or was this a kind of a one off? Frankie, how would you say this directorially fits into the rest of your interest?
FC: As a theatre maker, many of my professional credits have been musical theatre, and then classical theatre, like Shakespeare. In classical texts, there’s something you can kind of stretch and torque and play with looking at it from different angles. So in that way, I am interested in sort of the connection between old and new. I also really enjoy the idea of, like, queered theatre, not just theatre with queer themes or theatre with queer characters, but the whole structure, the whole endeavor being kind of twisted and played with. Directorially, I think a lot more about what the audience is experiencing: if they’re leaning in, bent over laughing, or if they’re recoiling in disgust. I’m quite pleased in either case. This play is built between the embodied experience of joy and levity, and also the reality of violence and cruelty. We witness some dark shit. We don’t shy away from the horror. I think that fits nicely into my goals as a theatre maker for this moment.
KAV: That’s so lovely, Frankie and I completely agree. I really like queering classics, like in every sense of the word queer. I acted in a bit of Shakespeare in college. I was in the Wellesley College Shakespeare Society, which, yes, exactly, toss, toss. But actually, it was really like four theatre nerds. We were very dedicated and engaged in the task. I’ve always had a kind of a love for Shakespeare, especially the comedies, but my time in this group left a beautiful impression on me. When I first came to Columbia for grad school, I wrote a 10 minute adaptation of Midsummer called Heliconia. It’s set partially in The Amazon because it was made for the Climate Change Reading Festival series we had that year. I wrote it from the perspective of the four lovers in the play, but they were Chevron employees who had been mandated by a court to clean up The Amazonian river. It was based on an actual trial carried out by a human rights lawyer. In this adaptation, Puck was the indigenous perspective in the forest and he got to watch these white people come in and destroy the forest. He gets to interact with them and play and punish them in different ways. That experience made me realize just how much you can do with Shakespeare. You can kind of do anything with his work. We twist and turn a lot of his stuff, and I think he would have wanted us to. If 400 years of this type of engagement with his work hadn’t ended him, I don’t think my work will do him in.
Generally, I am quite interested in adaptations. I directed an adaptation of Three Sisters for SoHo Shakespeare in 2023 called Three Sisters, Four Women. It was three sisters plus Natasha. They were the only characters in the play. So I guess it’s become, it’s becoming, part of my professional interest. But for me, this piece was more about finding the joy of writing again after years of becoming totally focused on the other people’s experience of my work. It was really a way to have a good time writing again. I didn’t necessarily attempt to make this play deep, but I think it ended up in a pretty profound place. I had a drink with my former professor David Henry Hwang and I told him I didn’t know where this play was going and if it would be at all meaningful and he told me to keep going. He told me that joy could be deep.
EB: Well, that’s the title of this interview. Joy can be deep.
KAV: The very last thing I was going to say, in terms of my larger body of work: I write about and work on shows that cover themes of hope, community and transformation. Those are three important words and concepts for me. I’m just really interested in even one character undergoing some sort of change, like spiritual change, from the beginning to the end of the play. What does that look like? This play fits nicely into that goal because it’s a play about how we adapt in order to both cope and hope.
Photo: Playwright Kanika Asavari Vaish and Director Frankie DiCiaccio.
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