King Lear - Actors' Shakespeare Project

Photo Credit: Maggie Hall. Pictured: Robert Walsh

King Lear – Actors’ Shakespeare Project

Review by James Wilkinson

This piece first ran on Edge Media Network: Here

King Lear is presented by Actors’ Shakespeare Project. Written by William Shakespeare. Directed by Doug Lockwood. Sceneic Designer: Jon Savage. Lighting Designer: Jeff Adelberg. Costume Designer: Jessica Pribble. Sound Designer: David Reiffel.

I love King Lear. It’s one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, second only to Macbeth. I love its messiness, its indulgences. I love the fact that the play seems to be bursting at its seams, unable to contain its own chaotic nature. Somehow, the center holds as everything along the edges deteriorates. I was excited to see Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s production of King Lear, partly because of the advertisement that kept popping up in my Facebook feed. In a series of images that resemble a Francis Bacon triptych, Lear (Robert Walsh) and his three daughters (Lydia Barnett-Mulligan, Jade Guerra and Marya Lowry) stand in front of a blood-red background, obscured by shadow and glaring out at the viewer. Lear’s face is distorted, his mouth frozen wide open in the silent scream that haunted Bacon’s work. This is what I wanted from King Lear, something messy and indulgent that pulsed with a wicked energy. Having come out the other end, I can say that I still want to see that show because that’s not what this is (shame on me for believing what’s written on the cereal box). Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s King Lear is a beast of another matter, one that reaches into the void and comes back emptyhanded.

The main problem here is that it’s difficult to pin down exactly what this production of King Lear is going for. Like with many of Shakespeare’s plays, there’s a myriad of avenues that you could go down. The basic plot has King Lear, a ruler in his advanced years, deciding to divide his kingdom between his three daughters. Two are able to properly flatter their father into gifting them large sections of land. The third is cast off for what Lear sees as the high crime of being insufficient in her praise of him. Now in monarch retirement, Lear is unable to deal with the loss of power and control that comes with it. He begins to lose his mental faculties while a kind of political rot takes root in the kingdom. And as this is a tragedy, you know it’s not going to turn out well for anyone involved.

It almost reads as a fairy tale with elements that could position the story as either a political narrative or as a more personal story (or maybe straddling something between the two). But when you step back and try to see how director Doug Lockwood has assembled the pieces of this production, you struggle to see how it all coalesces. You end up making leaps and guesses as to what it’s going for, but nothing quite seems to fit. Eventually you start to feel like you’re doing all of the work for the production. I stand by my love for the messiness of King Lear’s text. But that’s the text. The production has to find some way to pull it all together and that’s not happening here.

When you enter the theater, it’s as though you’ve crossed into someone’s attic (set design by Jon Savage). A dusty collection of old radios, televisions and other bits of junk line the back wall underneath a large hanging sheet of plastic. There’s a slide projector clacking away, pulling up images of blazing fires and desolate wastelands. When Lear enters, he’ll wander before landing in front of the screen, drawn by the images. They seem to conjuring a flicker of something in him. During the show he’ll occasionally turn this throne chair towards the action, watching the scenes he’s not in. It’s clear that some degree of thought has gone into the design elements, but towards what? What is this place we’ve come to other than “generic wasteland”?

Are we in Lear’s memory? Seems unlikely given that he’ll be dead by the end of the play. Are we in some kind of home for the infirm? Possible, given that the linen clothing the actors wear resembles hospital day-wear (costume design Jessica Pribble). But if that’s the case, then how do the actors fit in to the storytelling? With that reading, there’s no connection between the actors and characters. Could we be in hell or some other vision of the afterlife as Lear recounts his life? Once again, it’s possible, but then why all of the design emphasis on technology? What is the purpose of all of the analog junk cluttering the stage? It seems superfluous given that the actors perform the show completely devoid of props, miming even objects as simple as letters. Again, the issue I’m trying to point to here is that I’m guessing how these elements pull together rather than perceiving how they pull together.

Perhaps it wouldn’t be so much of an issue if the performance of the text itself were strong but here again, we run afoul. Lockwood makes some bold doubling choices with his cast that are interesting in theory and fall apart in practice. Actors are often stuck playing two characters in the same scene with little done to differentiate the performances. With each new entrance we’re in a constant guessing game as to who they might be. An occasional subtle hand gesture might let you know that a different person is talking, but which character is which? With no way to position ourselves, we lose any sense of who these people are to each other as the dialogue all runs together. Actor Louis Reyes McWilliams has an early scene where he’s the only one on stage, playing a scene between the two brothers, Edmund and Edgar. At one point this drew a laugh from the audience. But we weren’t laughing at the scene, we were laughing at the conceit of having one man play two. That shift means that we lose the suggestion that anything devious is happening in the moment (which, it is). McWilliams nearly pulls the moment off, but less successful is the blinding scene where Steven Barkhimer has the unenviable task of playing both the man getting blinded and the one doing the blinding. The practical necessities of staging the moment with only one actor manage to rob the scene of any emotional power.

We’re never quite off on the right emotional foot with this production. The opening, where Lear banishes Cordelia, feels like a mild tiff everyone will get over by the morning rather than the hubris-fueled earth-shattering moment that it’s supposed to be. Despite his best efforts, actor Robert Walsh never manages to exude an intimidating presence as Lear. His face is prone to breaking out into that mile-wide grin he has, which is more inviting than off-putting. He’s much more at home in the moments where Lear is cracking up, going into teddy bear mode. His best scene is the show’s final where Lear is reflecting on all of the destruction we’ve witnessed, but without the rage-fueled, opening this doesn’t feel like a man that’s fallen from a great height. There’s a storm raging at the center of Shakespeare’s King Lear, but Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s production can’t quite seem to find it.

King Lear is presented by Actors’ Shakespeare Project at Chelsea Theatre Works October 3-27, 2019.

For tickets and more information, visit their website: www.actorsshakespeareproject.org

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