"Lets' sit upon the ground ..."

Vagabond's press release promises an "intensely physical" production of Shakespeare's history play, Richard II. This is intriguing partly because Vagabond is an adventurous, small company that has given Philadelphia audiences some excellent theater (most recently, The Crucible and, last season, an evening of short, late Beckett plays they called "Desinence"), and partly because of all of Shakespeare's plays, especially the history plays, RII is the talkiest and least action-filled, and therefore least likely to be imagined as an "intensely physical" production.

The play is one of Shakespeare's many meditations on kingship, and RII clearly blew it: He wasted vast quantities of money, exploited his noblemen and indulged his childish appetites and vanities. The most egregious of his errors, he has misused the "divine right of kings." Bolingbroke, soon to become Henry IV, returns from an ill-judged banishment to depose the king.

Director Leonard Kelly says he'd been in love with the play for 15 years, but a full-scale production seemed prohibitively expensive. The solution is an "adaptation" by Charlie DelMarcelle, which eliminates two-thirds of the text and leaves only the high points of the plot. The idea is to explore the "visceral and dynamic relation of the body to the text," and Vagabond's production will illustrate that experiment.

“Let’s sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings: a physical workshop adaptation of Richard II,” May 22-June 8, $12-$18, Vagabond Acting Troupe at the Playground at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St., 215-563-4330.

—Toby Zinman