Lear in the Berkshires

We've been taking our kids to Shakespeare & Co. performances for about 17 years, and the troupe never disappoints. The players bring true, bawdy life to the plays. Plus, they enunciate real good. Last night was "King Lear."

This is the group's second year at their new home in Lenox, Mass., about a mile from where they started. The facilities are brand spanking new but, unfortunately, are indoors; the outdoor performances on the edge of the forest were magical. They are doing some works outdoors in the "Rose Footprint," benches set within the boundaries of the replica of The Rose theater they're building, but it only holds a few dozen people at this point. So, for now we're stuck comfortably indoors.

Shakespeare & Co. excels at the comedies: codpieces, pratfalls, silly accents...as well as pluck and love and self-discovery. They're not as facile with the tragedies. Under the direction of the troupe's founder, Tina Packer, last night's Lear — technically still in previews, so I'm basically reviewing beta software — was moving despite its flaws.

This is a tough play in every direction. It is unrelenting in its proclaiming of the failure of love. It takes an hour and a half of people being angry at one another to get things going. The on-stage violence — particularly the gouging out of Gloucester's eyes — is gruesome out of modern measure. The bodies pile up like cordwood at the end. The main character who goes mad is the easiest to ken of all the characters who are or pretend to be dissociated from reality.

That last reason is perhaps why the secondary characters were more convincing last night than the main ones. Malcolm Ingram's Kent, Daniel Sherman's Albany and Mel Cobb's Oswald were commanding presences whose persons revealed themselves throughout the course of the play. Kristin Wold's Cordelia was touching and believable. Mark Saturno's Cornwall revealed layer after layer of noble violence and wickeness. Ariel Bock and and Ellizabeth Aspenlieder as Goneril and Regan did what they must to drive their father insane but seemed to have little inner life until they played together; they are not Shakespeare's most individualized characters.

The main characters had a harder job of it. Only Gloucester has an arc which seemed unproblematic: stuff happens to him that pushes him towards his fate; Johnny Lee Davenport handled the role with aplomb. John Douglas Thompson shouted his way through Edmund with too much lust and not enough cunning; that's a plausible interpretation given the theme of the bastard as being closer to untamed nature, and it was clear why the sisters would fall for Thompson's Edmund, but his villainy didn't feel crooked or cooked enough.

And then we have the three madmen: Lear, the Fool, and Edgar in the guise of Tom O'Bedlam. Kevin Coleman's Fool enters with a broken heart and exits as Lear's truest child. His love of Lear, and Lear's love of him was clear and pure. (Tina Packer tips her hand early by having The Fool laugh in delight from the rafters when Cordelia refuses to flatter her father in the opening scene.) Jonathan Epstein's Lear was, to me, disappointing. In trying to play an 80 year old man, he talked in a distracting halting vocal rhythm, including the trick of picking up the beginning of the next sentence without a pause after the current one. It was also a remarkably lachrymose performance. He certainly had his moments — reuniting with Cordelia, but not raging in the elements — but the performance over all felt like a performance. Even a bit — sorry to say it — hammy.

And then we come to Edgar. Harold Bloom says that he's never seen a successful performance of this role, which he rightly considers to be the second focus of the play. Jason Asprey would not have changed Bloom's mind, but, then, what would? Yet Asprey's performance was terrific. His love for his evil brother seemed admirable and touching, not naive. His scenes with Gloucester were tender. His cradling of the brother he has just mortally wounded did more to explain Edmund's conversion than anything previous in Edmund's performance. His assuming the mantle of the king at the end seemed to be a moment of growth based in abiding character. And yet ... the time he spends in the king's train as Tom seemed under-motivated and his ramblings seemed too random to be of interest. And his failure to come clean to his blinded father seemed like a theatrical trick. I don't know how Edgar should be played to avoid those difficulties. Edgar's disguises are harder to understand than Edgar himself, and Asprey overall did him proud.

So, a night of tough-minded Lear. As always with Shakespeare & Co., the copious amounts of speech unmeaning to our modern ears is nevertheless presented with such heart and intent that we fathom it. Whatever the difficulties of the performances, we left stripped of some of our propriety, more aware of the tempest hidden behind the summer's midnight balm.

Put more plainly: Shakespeare & Co. is a treasure.

Article Author: David Weinberger

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