MFA Directing Candidate Mulls Over “Success”
Christopher Michael Richardson, a third-year MFA Directing candidate, is at the helm of the Wirtz Center’s production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which opened Friday, February 20 and runs until March 1st.
But beyond the show, Richardson knows a thing or two about success in a trying business.
“What I believe is so important as an artist is creating a dialogue between our present moment and the past as a way to manifest our future,” he says. “The piece that you're going to see from me or the things that I am engaging in are always going to invite dialogue and interrogation and curiosity.”
Richardson’s interest in connecting past, present, and future comes at an auspicious time—he’s winding down at Northwestern and considering his next steps. The pace of his career has never been a problem for him, as he’s been steadily creating, working, and evolving since he was in elementary school in Richmond, Va.
“I was always a public speaker,” he chuckles, “which is really weird. I was always the kid that did the presentation.”
The theatre bug bit in high school, which led him to major in that and English at the College of William & Mary. Directing held early appeal, but it wasn’t a trajectory he thought possible. “I just didn’t see directors that looked like me,” he says. “I thought, ‘acting is the safe path because everyone seems to like it when I do that.’”
He wasn’t entirely wrong about acting. Right out of undergrad, Richardson landed a job with a classical touring company, and he traveled the country acting and teaching workshops. He then moved to in Washington, D.C., and in 2016 was booked to play Elephant Gerald in the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Art’s touring production of Elephant and Piggie’s We Are In A Play, adapted from Mo Willems’ wildly popular children’s books. This role launched his D.C. career, Richardson said, and led to a snowballing of roles and new opportunities.
In 2019 Richardson was cast in Willems’ new work Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus (The Musical) as the eponymous Pigeon, a role that Richardson came to define.
“I was in the original cast,” he said of the now-wildly popular musical, “like, the first-ever Pigeon on stage, so that was super exciting.”
When the covid-19 pandemic shuttered theaters, the cast recorded the musical’s album. A few years later, when Richardson was a first-year MFA at Northwestern (shortly after a successful run as the Usher understudy in A Strange Loop at D.C.’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company and on London’s West End), he found himself in a downtown Chicago recording studio voicing the Pigeon once again, but this time for Tonies, a children’s digital audio player. Richardson’s Pigeon projects are ongoing.
“It’s been cool to keep building this relationship (with Willems),” he said. “It’s been an honor to be a small part of the Willems-verse.”
Even with the acting successes rolling in, Richardson was craving something new. The 2020 racial reckoning that roiled theaters nationwide turned out to be a call he was equipped to answer.
He said: “The light bulb went off for me and I thought, ‘We have to reevaluate the way we’re doing work to make sure that everybody is being fed, and nobody is feeling run over or unfulfilled in the work that they’re doing.”
Richardson, harnessing his early talents in communication, assembled some fellow D.C.-area artists to address issues plaguing theaters and work out solutions, but he soon became uncomfortable with the idea of being elevated into a role he wasn’t quite ready to assume.
“I didn’t want to become trapped in a leadership position without the opportunity to know myself as an artist and a leader,” he said. “I wanted the time to go back to school to hone my voice, test out what it means to be in leadership, and give myself the chance to learn and explore. And so that brought me to Northwestern.”
His three years in the MFA Directing program have been marked by developing his methodology, directing transformative and experimental works, and now “Success.”
“It’s a beast,” he said, laughing. “But we’re trying to have this conversation about success; what it means to be successful and what it costs. And that’s a very important thing to be talking about but also very important for Northwestern students to be thinking about.”
Richardson in his vision for the show mined the unsavory themes of success—commodification, homogenization, loss of self—to start a conversation between student actors and the audience, all cloaked in the humor of the classic musical. The irony is rich, given Richardson’s leadership style: selfless, collaborative, accountable—where success is measured not in commodities but in connection.
“The goal is that we’re making the future,” he said. “We have a responsibility not just to do a play but to make space for productive dialogue.”
Want a sneak preview? Watch Richardson and some of the Succeed cast on WGN News.