King Lear
In the Actors’ Shakespeare Project production of King Lear, playing a limited run in the intimate annex of La MaMa downtown, the largeness of Lear is trapped in the slight, mobile body of the eighty-one year old Alvin Epstein, who plays the king as an irascible old man with the fight of a small dog. It’s really a thing to see. Epstein skitters across the stage getting in faces and throwing quixotic punches, shocking his familiars with impetuous energy, and substituting privileged, childlike nakedness for Lear’s usual frail vulnerability. You could picture the old kook playing stick ball and shooting marbles with his retinue of knights, were he to have the stage space. He also throws fits. This old man has lived a long, long time and become ferociously himself; we respond, of course, with transfixed, and misplaced, love.
That the gargantuan emotion and towering, unutterable loss of Shakespeare’s play could center around this odd, little man is a marvel, and teaches us an important lesson about poetry and theater. No actor is as infinitely wrathful as Lear or as infinitely lovely as Cordelia, and the best performances find the finite hidden in the poetry. The key to Lear is to color impossible extremity – “Howl, howl, howl, howl, howl,” – with the shade of an idiosyncratic mind. Epstein, with his fully human Lear, teaches us that it isn’t the poetry that is the thing, it is the mortal fight toward the poetry. As he howls and blusters and soliloquizes, he is laying siege on the inarticulate. He elicits pathos from expressive failures as much as verbal dexterity, and the manifold brilliance of Shakespeare’s words provide him the room.
Epstein’s fresh performance ripples through the production and conquers some of the problems that can beset the play. I've not seen a Lear who we can so easily imagine being loved by the ones who love him: his servants, his fool, his youngest daughter. Distant fathers, even good ones, are easy to drift away from, but this Lear is so relentlessly present that we understand the violence with which he is both loved and scorned. Cordelia's coldness in the opening scene – the misfire that sets tragedy in motion – becomes an act of unnatural and misplaced dispassion. This Lear is undeserving of such undaughterly reproof; she might have at least been honest and cut down his pomposity with the harsh insight of one who knows us best. That Sarah Newhouse, as Cordelia, spends the rest of the play wringing her hands as a shorthand for real acting, is the chief disappointment of the evening.
There are some good supporting performances, though much of the cast is forgettable. Colin Lane plays Gloucester as a youngish, understated sufferer whose flawed resignation is a foil to Lear's mad defiance. Ken Cheeseman’s haggard fool is boyishly loving and daring, and he works overtime to provide the familial feeling we miss from Cordelia, who remains prosaic throughout, and from Edgar (Doug Lockwood), who is a convincing madman but unconvincing son. Benjamin Evett, who plays the villainous Edmund, hasn’t been told this is serious theatre, and pulls out the stops to create one hell of a saucy bastard.
But if the ensemble as a whole isn’t quite up the task – especially in the second half where the pace must be kept lively as plot intrudes – we are nevertheless treated to a feast of theatre. The annex space at La Mama puts the audience right up against the heat of the action, on all sides of the stage, and is as atmospheric as it is intimate. The lighting, designed by Mark O’Maley, had me mesmerized as white light was entrapped in mist to create a stage more convincingly spatial and inhabited than anything under a proscenium arch. Along with the subtly textured sound design, it provided the coherence that the too-cool leather costumes, a puzzling trope of non-period Shakespeare, were going for. In this space, the scenes of a world gone topsy-turvy with a lunatic playing judge and a king stripped down to a loin cloth were viscerally shocking, even in these less rigidly hierarchical times. There are still poor Tom’s out there, after all.
But the real accomplishment is Epstein’s, who handles his energy with a virtuoso touch and avoids both the sameness of bluster and the unreality of precision, using every octave of his considerable range. He is a madman philosopher, a regretful father, and a broken soul with the same invested daring as he plays King. He is a shape shifter tragically tethered to the permanent bedrock of personality. He is human, and that he loses so very much is unbearable.
That the gargantuan emotion and towering, unutterable loss of Shakespeare’s play could center around this odd, little man is a marvel, and teaches us an important lesson about poetry and theater. No actor is as infinitely wrathful as Lear or as infinitely lovely as Cordelia, and the best performances find the finite hidden in the poetry. The key to Lear is to color impossible extremity – “Howl, howl, howl, howl, howl,” – with the shade of an idiosyncratic mind. Epstein, with his fully human Lear, teaches us that it isn’t the poetry that is the thing, it is the mortal fight toward the poetry. As he howls and blusters and soliloquizes, he is laying siege on the inarticulate. He elicits pathos from expressive failures as much as verbal dexterity, and the manifold brilliance of Shakespeare’s words provide him the room.
Epstein’s fresh performance ripples through the production and conquers some of the problems that can beset the play. I've not seen a Lear who we can so easily imagine being loved by the ones who love him: his servants, his fool, his youngest daughter. Distant fathers, even good ones, are easy to drift away from, but this Lear is so relentlessly present that we understand the violence with which he is both loved and scorned. Cordelia's coldness in the opening scene – the misfire that sets tragedy in motion – becomes an act of unnatural and misplaced dispassion. This Lear is undeserving of such undaughterly reproof; she might have at least been honest and cut down his pomposity with the harsh insight of one who knows us best. That Sarah Newhouse, as Cordelia, spends the rest of the play wringing her hands as a shorthand for real acting, is the chief disappointment of the evening.
There are some good supporting performances, though much of the cast is forgettable. Colin Lane plays Gloucester as a youngish, understated sufferer whose flawed resignation is a foil to Lear's mad defiance. Ken Cheeseman’s haggard fool is boyishly loving and daring, and he works overtime to provide the familial feeling we miss from Cordelia, who remains prosaic throughout, and from Edgar (Doug Lockwood), who is a convincing madman but unconvincing son. Benjamin Evett, who plays the villainous Edmund, hasn’t been told this is serious theatre, and pulls out the stops to create one hell of a saucy bastard.
But if the ensemble as a whole isn’t quite up the task – especially in the second half where the pace must be kept lively as plot intrudes – we are nevertheless treated to a feast of theatre. The annex space at La Mama puts the audience right up against the heat of the action, on all sides of the stage, and is as atmospheric as it is intimate. The lighting, designed by Mark O’Maley, had me mesmerized as white light was entrapped in mist to create a stage more convincingly spatial and inhabited than anything under a proscenium arch. Along with the subtly textured sound design, it provided the coherence that the too-cool leather costumes, a puzzling trope of non-period Shakespeare, were going for. In this space, the scenes of a world gone topsy-turvy with a lunatic playing judge and a king stripped down to a loin cloth were viscerally shocking, even in these less rigidly hierarchical times. There are still poor Tom’s out there, after all.
But the real accomplishment is Epstein’s, who handles his energy with a virtuoso touch and avoids both the sameness of bluster and the unreality of precision, using every octave of his considerable range. He is a madman philosopher, a regretful father, and a broken soul with the same invested daring as he plays King. He is a shape shifter tragically tethered to the permanent bedrock of personality. He is human, and that he loses so very much is unbearable.
