The royal “we” unifies the nation, the land and its people, into the symbolic body of the monarch. This weekend at the University Theater in New Haven, Karin Coonrod’s Compagnia de’ Colombari is staging the most innovative version of Shakespeare’s great tragedy of monarchy that I’ve seen in a long time. See better, Lear, the play commands. But what if everywhere we look we see many things?
The production’s brilliant and generative coup de theatre – ten Kings in ten paper crowns all playing the title role – mounted to a takeover of the entire space of the theater, with actors playing Lear speaking from all three aisles, in front of the stage, and along several rows of blocked-off seats. No King spoke more than two or three lines at the start, so that when Tony Torn open-facedly importuned his daughters, “Which of you shall we say doth love us most?” (1.1), he quickly passed the next lines (“Where nature doth with merit challenge”) to another King, even before we in our seats had time to register the audacity and greed of the question. The King needed something, wanted something, but as his lines ping-ponged around the theater, as we absorbed the selfishness of the love test, we watched that royal “we,” the King as community, voicing itself into disorderly being. It made thrilling theater.
One of the consequences of pluralizing the monumental title role of the play was to slip the King out of our moral grasp. When he’s just one man, even a big star like Ian McKellen or Derek Jacobi, it hard not to blame Lear for cluelessness and cruelty. When he’s all around us and speaking in ten voices, the distributed King becomes both a part of community and trapped by collectivity, locked inside his “fixed purpose laid with iron rails,” to borrow from a maritime monomaniac who is himself modeled on King Lear. All the paper-crowned Lears in this production together produced a collective that each King’s titanic ego could not help being bound into.
As I perhaps over-enthusiastically said after the show to my friend & fellow Shakespearean Mike Shea, the opening scene in King Lear is the best scene in all of English drama – and I don’t think I’ve seen a more exciting performance of that scene than this one.
The “nothing” that the Kings and Cordelia batted back and forth at the opening seemed in this articulation to represent some kind of escape. If Cordelia could hold to her bond – “Love, and be silent” – could she avoid the rhetorical dance of hypocrisy and manipulation, in which it would be in any case impossible to match her ruthless sisters? Seldom has a trip from England to France seemed so good!
All the actors in Colombari’s cast were excellent,and they worked together with generosity and visible pleasure. I was especially appreciative of Tony Torn’s evocative mixture of Oswald and the King, not only because he and his partner, my St. John’s colleague Lee Ann Brown, joined us for dinner before the show. I’ll hear his plaintive “love us the most” whenever I think about this line. Abigail Killeen’s Goneril/Lear absorbed the brutality of her father’s wrath, in which he cursed her “organs of increase” and her future progeny, with heartbreaking silence. Jo Mei’s sharp-edged Regan/Lear digested her husband Cornwall’s part, meaning that she got to extract the “vile jelly” of Gloucester’s eyes in the latter half of the action. Julian Elijah Martinez’s crowd-pleasing Edmund had everyone ready to to take the bastard’s part. Paul Pryce’s wonderfully physical Kent/Lear brought comic and moral force – and like almost everyone I talked with after the show, I was entranced by Luka Papenfusscline’s musical Fool/Lear. Their ethereal voice made the Fool into Lear’s self-reflection and internal choral experiment, a way to think and sing through the crisis of personality that befell the King who misplaced his kingdom.
The spatial takeover, in which the actors occupied the seats and the aisles, climaxed at the play’s raging center, when the Kings walked alone into the storm, and as a chorus intonde together the great speech that I interpret as Shakespeare’s proleptic imagination of what it’s like to live inside the disorderly environment of the Anthropocene:
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world,
Crack Nature’s moulds, all germains spill at once,
That makes ingrateful man! (3.2)
(For more on the storm and the Anthropocene, come to my Ideas Panel with Tara Bradway and David Sterling Brown, on the Green Tuesday June 18 at noon!)
After the storm, the curtain finally opened and the remainder of the play’s action took place on the stage, or, in the case of the mock-trial of Goneril and Regan, on the front apron. There was some great stuff in these later acts, including the blinding of Gloucester and the Dover Cliff meta-theater. In some ways, however, by placing all the actors back on the same horizontal plane, distant from the audience, rather than distributing voices and bodies amongst our seats, the action felt slightly removed. Even the on-stage deaths, each one removing one more Lear from the chorus, were somehow less immediate than the preceding whirligig of immersion. The death of Oswald, slain in combat by knightly Edgar as the true brother began the campaign that would lead to his defeat of his false brother Edmund, provided real pathos, thanks again to Tony Torn’s wonderfully emotive work. But when Oswald slumped down into death, I missed his contributions to the chorus of kings. Torn would get up and lend his voice to the final scene, but as Lear, not Oswald. Part of the genius of Coonrod’s gambit was to suggest that when he and all the other actors had previously voiced Lear’s lines, they did so both as an actor playing Lear and also through their other roles, in Torn’s case as Oswald, the abused child of the kingdom.
I love an intermissionless fast Shakespeare, and I have no complaints about necessary cuts, even though Cornwall and Albany are both interesting figures. But two-plus a bit hours is a long time to sit rapt, and there were moments in the second half when I drifted. I wondered a bit if letting just one Lear – Tom Neils, who also played the King of France – hold center stage for so long dulled the palate just a bit. I was starting to miss the community of kings!
They all reunited for the end, whispering together the painful “howls” and “nevers” which consign Cordelia’s body, “dead as earth,” to rest. The best and most re-orienting moments in this production, which I’m excited to see two more times over its short weekend run, featured all the Kings together, either parceling out lines one to the next (1.1) or chorusing them together (5.3).
Some questions remain too painful to answer. “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,” the Kings croon at Cordelia’s lifeless form, “And thou no breath at all?” (5.3)
Get to the University Theater before it closes on Sunday night!