Given the document available on reading a script, this will pursue other questions centered on themes and ideas.
1. What are the play's central ideas about language, and how is language heard and portrayed?
Notice all the different forms of English you need to hear by speaking the script out loud. Above all, consider the varieties of Black styles: US Southern, West Indian island accents, New York style, etc. Compare with White styles: maybe Irish-American, possibly, for the Constable, or an upper-class style for Price.
What do we infer, hear, and feel about these different kinds of English? Who "owns" English, and who has a right to speak Shakespeare's English? How might Shakespeare's English have sounded in his own time? Does anyone have the "right" accent or the "right" English or the "right" to one style, dialect, historical variety, or cultural variety of English?
Who can switch styles, reinvent themselves stylistically?
How and when do people switch language styles when performing, singing, or doing something more spiritual (when Papa Shakespeare "plays" griot)? Compare ritual performances and social performances like his with theatrical performances such as Jimmy performs?
2. What issues does the play raise about who has propriety over, and is appropriate as an actor for, English-language classics such as Shakespeare's Richard III. When and how should the language be changed? Parodies performed?
3. Casting and companies: how and when do color, gender, or other body and social differences matter in who can play what parts? What are the issues raised about blacks playing whites, compared to whites playing blacks? What kind of imagination is required when we see actors of one shade color playing characters who may have been a different color? Compare that kind of belief to the kind of imagination invoked when, in Shakespeare's day, boys played women or children, or when children played adults (in Shakespeare's time there were all-boys' companies playing all adult roles in serious and demanding plays)?
4. How do privileged white members of the society maintain social control over, regulate, and suppress others (lower classes, other colors) whom they feel threaten them economically or socially or culturally? What means do individuals or groups in the dominant culture use for control? What kinds of sanctions do they impose? How honest are they, in what they say about their motives and their goals?
5. How do minority groups and marginal or subordinated individuals find means for resistance, violation, and challenge to the people, or to their agents or means, who work to suppress, restrain, silence, or punish them? How or when are these challenges aimed at individuals, institutions, or systems within the world of the play, or at the audience's expectations, assumptions, values?
6. How do characters respond to personal or sexual attraction, fear, danger, risk, innovation, other difficulties, frustrations, impediments, or changes? What do we learn about facing, avoiding, and voicing conflict? About doing mediation or helping people resolve or deal with their conflicts openly? About aiding and abetting conflict? About keeping safe and serving the status quo?
7. The play is based on some central historical facts, in Richard III was a specific play that was actually performed at the same time in 1820 by two companies in NYC. This fact is not, in itself, an idea. The play, however, uses the fact as a basis for dramatizing many ideas about who has the right to perform such plays, speak such English, play such roles of various kinds, and the like. Are any of these metatheatrical themes, which are also themes about other cultural rights, appropriate especially to performing Richard III, Shakespeare's early history play? Are there any parallel or ironic themes that the two plays share? Any shared or neatly contrasting situations in New York and Richard's England? How do issues of royalty, usurpation, revolution, and resistance arise when African members of the company play various parts in RIII? What is the contrast when Brown writes a new play about a King, King Shotaway, and about revolution, resistance, and uprising in the Caribbean rather than doing a play from the 16th century?
8. What ideas do you develop as the play raises questions about the relationship between one's own identity and the theatrical parts one plays? When you "say" and "do" what is required for a character, do you indeed say and do those words and acts? In what sense do you? In what sense don't you? Can playing a part change or threaten who you are? Do you compromise or violate your own values when you play a character who says and does actions you would not do? Can playing such a character change you, even subtly? Is it naïve of Sara to think Lady Anne's behavior has any effect or bearing on who she is and what she does?
9. What are some of the various responses characters have to Africans and African-Americans performing Shakespeare, to performing in other spheres -- dancing, drumming, and music?
10. What is the significance of Papa Shakespeare's name? What analogies are made between his work and that of his "brother William"? What relationships are there between the work of Shakespeare and that of the griot?
11. Does reading, knowing about, or having studied Richard III matter when you read or attend The African Company Presents Richard III. Does it help to know something about the significance of the Shakespeare work in cultural history? What is the "cultural capital" -- the status, prestige, social meaning -- attached to seeing or performing the Shakespeare play?