The Chicago Shakespeare Theater's production of "King Lear" seems a bit like "King Lear and His Merry Men"–an account of Lear in exile with his remaining loyalists. While this focus serves to illuminate retrospectively the play's opening scene–a significant achievement; haven't you always wondered, after all, what the hell he was doing giving away his kingdom?–it scants attention to much of the play's current action. The origin of Lear's decision is an important question, but it's not the only question: there's also the matter of its consequences, for his family and for the kingdom. These include the shifting political and sexual alliances of Goneril, Regan, their husbands and the bastard Edmund, as well as Cordelia's actions as Queen of France.
Director Barbara Gaines gives short shrift to these external consequences: when she directs King Lear, she's directing King Lear, and only the people in the King's presence really matter. Thereby she achieves the remarkable–not to say weird–result of presenting a King Lear that's about fathers and sons instead of about fathers and daughters.
Within the focus she's chosen, though, Gaines has used Chicago Shakespeare's trademark textual clarity to show the audience who, and what, King Lear is all about. The direction is so transparent that there seems to be nothing between the audience and the text, so that we can see–for the first time, perhaps–just how amazing a text it truly is. Gaines and her actors deserve credit for this transparency, a theatrical sleight-of-hand that makes audiences feel like they're discovering the play all by themselves. Any director of a classic play would be justly delighted to have engendered this feeling of discovery. And yet there's a sense in which the freshness is also faux-naive, and fails to do justice to the complexity of Shakespeare's work.
We see how Lear (Greg Vinkler) throws his life away because it will someday be taken from him. We recognize the pure human spite involved in his giving away everything and then feeling sick because he has nothing. When the Fool (the admirable Scott Parkinson) says "I'll go to bed at noon," we know why he's sobbing: because Lear has ‚Äògone to bed' before his time. When Lear repeats "Oh, let me not be mad," we register how completely insane he's been acting while still in full possession of his faculties. All of the play's reverses–understanding through madness, sight through blindness, and the constant confusion of imposture and honesty–are highlighted, so that when Lear asks "Which is the justice, and which is the thief?" we experience a shock of recognition: that is, indeed, the fractured world we've been occupying, in which the honest and plain-spoken–Kent, the Fool, Edgar and Cordelia–must spend all their time concealed, while the flatterers and scoundrels display themselves proudly.
But the director's clarity deserts her–or disserves her–when it comes to the ongoing conflict between Lear and his daughters. Here she crosses the line from simple to simplistic, seeming satisfied with the notion that Goneril and Regan are evil and nothing but, and directing Lisa Dodson and Celeste Williams to chortle like Cruella DeVil the first time Lear leaves the room. Shakespeare was too good a dramatist to create such one-dimensional villains, and Gaines and her actresses pay the price for performing them: at the apex of every one of the daughters' big dramatic scenes, the audience laughs. Nor does it seem to do justice to Lear's complex feelings, encompassing both betrayal and desire for reconciliation, to have him kick Goneril in the crotch. This bizarre piece of business appeared in the company's last stab at King Lear, and it didn't work then, either. Nowhere in the rather extensive male vocabulary of abuse of women are there kicks in the crotch; that's a hostile action one man takes against another. Perhaps this was Gaines' point–that Goneril has taken Lear's manhood–but the gesture is so shocking and peculiar that any meaning which may attach to it is lost. Meanwhile, Cordelia barely appears (some substantial cuts have been made), and when she does Ana Sferruzza doesn't seem to have figured out how to do anything but look pained.
The extraordinary performance belongs to Kevin Gudahl, as Kent–and it's so powerful that, with considerable help from the director, it begins to distort the play. I've never before seen a production of Lear in which I would describe Kent as the star, and Kent's love and loyalty as the central issue. Certainly Shakespeare has provided plenty to chew on about fathers and sons or son-substitutes, with the pairings of Kent and Lear as well as Edgar and Gloucester. But to suggest that the play is about those relationships goes beyond innovative to essentially false. Timothy Kane contributes to this distortion with a fine performance as Poor Tom, Edgar in disguise.
Gaines gives a brief nod to all the external issues she's ignored by having actors dressed as beggars wander through scenes of Lear's exile. This half-hearted effort at social comment goes off the rails before the curtain rises, when the actors go begging among the audience, causing us to wonder where the fourth wall is when we need it.