Daily Times

Playing Shakespeare’s Richard III, actor Faran Tahir holds a useless left arm to his side and limps with his left foot turned slightly inward. But he is not frail, not hideous. Stalking a bare rehearsal stage in jeans and a black T-shirt, with a shaved head, he is unmistakably a man rather than a monster, virile as he woos Lady Anne, whose husband and father he has murdered, then gloats about it in an aside to the audience.

Richard III is often played as a hunchback, grotesque in mind and body, half murderous villain and half special effect. But for Commonwealth Shakespeare Company’s “Richard III,” playing free on Boston Common July 18-Aug. 5, Tahir and director Steven Maler have toned down the physical aspect to focus on his misshapen spirit, as he carves a bloody path to the throne.

“I think the fascination is not that he is such an evil [man]. I mean, he does what he does, and he justifies it in the first soliloquy,” Tahir says. “The challenge to me is a bigger one: How do you find something in him that people can relate to, not just enjoy the devilish side of him? How do you explore the human side of him, the vulnerabilities? He is not without conscience, and that conscience finally catches up to him.”

Shakespeare never creates a cardboard villain, Maler says, and when an actor can play all the contours and dimensions of Richard (referred to in the text as “Gloucester,” for he is the Duke of Gloucester), the crowd roots for him in a way, enthralled by him.

“It’s a character that has the opportunity to forge this incredible connection with the audience until they can’t any longer,” Maler says, “until they become revulsed by his actions and feel complicit in them to a certain degree, because they’ve been cheering him on.”

The cast scattered across the rehearsal stage at Babson College in Wellesley includes Remo Airaldi as Clarence, Richard’s doomed brother; Libby McKnight as Lady Anne; and Bobbie Steinbach as Queen Margaret, whose tongue-lashing of Richard is a first-act highlight.

Tahir is a fourth-generation artist. His grandparents and great-grandparents were writers and playwrights, and his parents are both actors and directors. While his roots are in Pakistan, he was born in Los Angeles. The family returned to Pakistan when his father was offered the artistic directorship of a prestigious theater in Lahore, before Tahir returned to the United States for high school and college. He has acted both in Pakistan — where he has been directed by his father, and played opposite his mother — and onstage in New York.

Eventually he began landing TV and movie roles, including the nasty Raza in “Iron Man” and Captain Robau in the 2009 “Star Trek.” In an interview, anyway, he is relatively sanguine about the challenges actors from the Indian Subcontinent face in Hollywood, where they are often typecast as bad guys. “I have a rule if I do three bad guys, if the fourth one comes, my agents know this and they’re very good about it, even if it’s a little bit of a kick to the bank account, let’s not do that,” he says.

Published in Daily Times, July 22^nd 2018.