ARCHDUKE
Enjoying/getting the most out of Archduke (at least the first act) is largely dependent on knowing the real history of who the characters are, and what they did, ahead of time. I'm sure the creators would debate that. I imagine development on this piece was full of conversations about "how much of this story do you need to know right off the bat, and how much are these characters just interesting on their own?" The characters are interesting on their own, but, honestly, if you don't know where this is going they quickly become a bit obnoxious and tedious. The truth is, everyone in this play is a bit dumb (some more so than others) and that makes for an interesting character study if, again, you know where this train is headed. If you don't, it starts to feel a bit like a Three Stooges film where all the Stooges do is talk.
The marketing campaign also isn't doing this show any favors. I saw one youtube add where star Patrick Page quickly ran through the logline and premise for the show - and that was great! Super helpful and makes you want to go! But most of the advertising is simply the above poster which is NOT enough to make you want to go or help you enjoy the evening if you do end up seeing it (seriously folks, PLEASE put a basic longline on advertising!)
What you DO need to know is this (and this is from the shows' website):
This darkly comic play follows Gavrilo Princip, better known as the assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his fellow revolutionaries, reimagined not as masterminds but rather a hapless, helpless band of teenagers.
With razor-sharp humor, Archduke transforms a pivotal moment in global politics into an absurdly relevant theatrical experience, reminding us that too often history is written by the least qualified recruits.
For those who've forgotten most things from your High School world history class, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand was the inciting incident for World War I, and, (through a circuitous route,) World War II. The assassins, whatever they were like day to day, were pretty much bumbling idiots on the day of the assassination and it's only through absolute dumb luck that the assassination happened at all. Of the three assassins, one threw his bomb at the wrong car, completely missing (and leaving un injured) his intended target, fled, tried to kill himself by jumping in a river...which turned out to be only a few inches deep, broke his leg, get caught, and was hauled off to jail. One didn't even attend the assassination (he made an overlong stop at a brothel), and the third missed his shot, alerting security and causing the Archduke's car to flee. He, figuring the job was botched, went off to get a sandwich and, low and behold, the Archduke's car took a wrong turn and ended up stopped smack dab in front of him - whereupon he shot him.
The piece has strong thematic resonance for today - something I actually wish had been brought forward even more. At the center of the play are two (ultimately three) naive young men (boys, really,) who are radicalized into committing a horrific, violent act. There are overtones of the incel community (the way all the characters talk about women, even when they're "sympathetic" to them is uncomfortable in a way that feels tragically all too familiar). Page's character even talks about a truly despicable act of violence he committed against a woman because, while he was attempting to murder her husband, she had the audacity to shoot him in self defense, and "being shot by a woman" was so humiliating he had to "save face" in front of his men in as bold a way as possible. And even then he bemoans that his "bros" won't stop making fun of him for it. There is weaponized and manipulated nationalism for a country that most of the characters onstage don't really know the first thing about (despite being citizens), scapegoating (the young men are told that the fact that they're dying of TB is somehow the fault of the Austro-Hungarian empire) and twisted religion. All of these things become relevant right from the start of the show.
But the details...the characters' obsession with sandwiches (being poor they've almost never had one, certainly not hot, and absolutely not from a nice restaurant - with the exception of one man who once had a nun buy him one...), the fact that all of them are virgins and are desperate to be with a woman before they die...get a bit tedious unless you already know the joke being set up for you (i.e. leaving an assassination attempt to get a sandwich and missing the assassination altogether to visit a brothel.) Which leaves us, for quite a while, rather confused and a bit annoyed with the banality of the characters... until the late in the game "aha!" moment. It feels like there are a lot of loose threads leading nowhere...and, given the fact that we have to wait for two hours to find out that assessment is incorrect, it makes parts of the show feel a bit tedious. There's nothing to make us trust that we are in "safe" hands...except the promise inherent in the knowledge of who the author is...but that trust is often strained to the limit.
Rajiv Joseph - who exploded onto the off-Broadway/Broadway scene with Gruesome Playground Injuries (which is now a staple of every acting class) and The Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo - always creates interesting work, and it's exciting to see a new offering of his. I don't know if Archduke is going to hit quite as hard as those previous offerings. It gets a little too bogged down in talking about politics without showing the effects, sits a little too much in comedy and not enough in the social relevance parallel to our current times. I'm always thankful for a writer who actually wants to write ABOUT something, and do it in an interesting way, but the main feeling I left the theater with was: if this play was submitted to Roundabout as a blind submission, and no one knew Joseph was attached... I don't think it would have been produced. And that's not meant to be a dig at Joseph's work, but more a commentary on the dozens of brilliant pieces, (many of them more brilliant than this particular play), that fall by the wayside every year because they don't have an "in" with an artistic director. This is me getting on my soapbox, and this is not meant about Joseph specifically, but rather meant in a broader context: we need to stop rushing to produce everything a particular writer has written merely because someone has a relationship with them or they've written great things in the past. We need to actually produce the best work. One of the reasons Playwrights Horizons has had such a fall since they were the premiere developer of new work in the '80's and '90's is because a subsequent artistic director started only producing work by his friends... and it wasn't very good.
Director Darko Tresnjak has done a good job... though I think more could have been done to help Page get through his ENORMOUS monologue describing the history of Serbia and the Austro-Hungarian empire. Page is working his butt off, but we do start to tune out, and the direction of that moment is partly why. The set by Alexander Dodge is smart and efficient, Linda Cho's costumes are great when they're great, and bland if they're not (we could definitely used some costuming help differentiating between the three young men.) Lighting by Matthew Richards was nice. The sound design by Jane Shaw drew attention, and not in a good way. There are many instances in the show where characters are meant to be hiding, and the number of times there's a sound like footsteps approaching, or a door squeaking open and not a single character onstage reacts were confusing and pulled you out of the action. The more subtle sound cues however were quite effective. The fight direction by Ricío Mendez is a bit...obvious. There's no danger of thinking characters are actually fighting...it feels...safely staged.
Laura Sele
Archduke is currently playing off-Broadway at Roundabout's Laura Pels Theatre
Tickets: https://www.roundabouttheatre.org/get-tickets/2025-2026-season/archduke/performances
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