KING LEAR
Adapted and Directed by Karin Coonroad
A Production of Compagnia de’ Colombari
Company Website
Show Webpage
Recently at LaMama
Further Venues TBA
Reviewed by David Spencer
There are, to broadly oversimplify, only two ways for a director to newly interpret a classic piece—assuming a certain essential faithfulness to text; within those two ways cutting may be appropriate, but there can be no actual rewriting, no revising, no “creating a new work”—all of which would be fodder for another, more complex topic.
The first way is straight-ahead. Doesn’t mean you can’t relocate the era and/or conceive something environmental—if you must—but the play must be recognizably the play as originally written. To wit:
My favorite King Lear, of the many I’ve seen, was directed by Gerald Freedman and was a production of the Roundabout when it was still an exclusively off-Broadway company. The roaring, tragic center of it was Hal Holbrook in the title role. It was 1990. This is significant because, as a regular theatregoer, you reach a certain age wherein you’ve seen every Shakespeare play there is, even the problem plays, and if a production can make you forget you know the story, it’s going to stick with you for years. I was sitting up close with my still-significant other and by the end, she was sobbing; and I was, though tearless, pretty moved myself. (The only other Shakespeare production that ever affected me as its rival for suspense was David Tennant’s Hamlet, directed by Gregory Doran as filmed for television in 2009—but I digress; though only slightly, because that one was given a modern setting in which the camera recording it all, seemed itself to be a character. Yet it was undeniably Shakespeare-pure Hamlet.)
The second way is via deconstructive technique, use of abstract imagery, rejection of literalism. The opposite of straight-ahead, this approach puts theme ahead of coherent linearity.
Take John Doyle’s minimalist Sweeney Todd, for example, with a cast of ten who also doubled as the show’s orchestra. As I wrote when reviewing it in 2005: “There are no literal locales (no actual pie shop), nor literal set pieces (no actual barber chair, no actual stove, no actual harmonium, no actual boat taking Sweeney and Anthony to shore) and it is only infrequently that the players make eye contact (it’s usually reserved for up-close, two-person moments that demand face to face communion, but even those are not sacrosanct: in “Kiss Me” the lovers never kiss); in most configurations—some of which are quite elaborate, utilizing the coffin [a central, symbolic prop], a ladder and other availables to create levels—the cast are facing front. So […] it’s not quite a full production and not quite a concert adaptation.”
What’s common to shows within each of these categories? And let’s assume being done well as a given…
The first category can function as anyone’s introduction to the piece. Whatever else may be true, the path through the text is unambiguous.
The second category requires that you have sufficient familiarity with the piece going in—at least if you’re to fully comprehend what’s going on, story-wise; and approximately comprehend what’s being attempted interpretively.
And it is into that second category that director-adapter Karin Coonrod’s King Lear falls. It’s a production of her Compagnia de’ Colombari company, which specializes in deconstructive, experimental approaches to classic texts.
Start with the playing space: stripped down in a manner that might accommodate any theatre’s configuration (upon readjusting the blocking), it takes a black box approach in which the entire auditorium is the box, and actors are as likely to appear in the aisles and the balcony as on the central playing space; and at any time.
Then comes the introduction of Lear himself…or more appropriately, himselves…because at the start, he is played by the entire company of ten, both men and women. They appear from all over, surrounding and then invading the audience space, each wearing a tall paper crown. The symbolism’s purpose isn’t immediately apparent, but clearly we’re in the territory of psychological fragmentation. What is immediately apparent, and intriguing, is that the cast is so varied that every Lear has a different persona, yet the same blind pride. And when the crowns are removed, the players split off to become the supporting characters they will play singly for the rest of the evening, though occasionally circling back to cameo as Lear.
What begins to emerge is that there’s the capacity for Lear-ish stubbornness—what these days is commonly referred to as cognitive dissonance—in all of us. And there are moments when the lines blur, since the supporting characters have their own blind spots and complexities.
Inevitably, though there are fewer and fewer Lears—the more that’s lost to the tragic king, the more he understands himself as the architect of his own disaster, and the more his disparate personalities coalesce—and, perhaps also inevitably, when he’s distilled into one, the actor in the cast who seems the most natural candidate for a conventional approach, Tom Nelis, carries the most soul-searching of all the king’s scenes. It’s a deeply satisfying landing point.
What’s not fragmented at all is the running time. This approach to Lear resists interruption and the adaptation speeds by in under two hours, sans intermission.
The evening ends with a coup de théâtre I won’t describe, lest it be an effects spoiler, that’s the reverse of the opening’s fragmentation.
As I type these words, Joe Biden is still fighting to stay in the race for President, and it’s objectively impossible to know if the beltway’s shrewdest player, Nancy Pelosi, is wise in urging him to give way; or if we should all just take a step back and be guided by Allan Lichtman’s 13 keys. But what’s unmistakably clear is the image of a genuinely good and accomplished man raging against encroaching darkness with the full force of his resume, yet in denial about the dark forces of age that don’t care about his record. It’s hard to view the schism and not think about Karin Coonrod’s Lear.
As I say, it’s not a Lear for the newbie. You don’t necessarily have to have seen a traditional Lear first, but at least knowing the play will keep you moving smartly along its path. If the production re-emerges, which I imagine it will, and soon, have at the ready your copy of Edith Nesbit’s Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare (for the plot), or Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare (for both plot and the deep historical dive)…and then allow yourself to revel in the abstractions.