As the temperature was dropping fast Friday night, ahead of today’s now-raging snowstorm, I brought a lively group out to the East Village haunts where I lived in the 1990s to see Colombari’s ten-headed King Lear. Such a show!
This play is always overwhelming, and every time I see it, it rolls me in its powerful surf. Probably my favorite description of the the experience of King Lear comes from the great Argentine writer Julio Cortazar, who writes about his own capacity for being overwhelmed by both art and nature:
If I get so carried away by a spider-web covered with dew, what will I do in the evening when we are going to see King Lear?
How are we supposed to make sense of these things? What is the possible context for art that overwhelms you?
I’ve been thinking a lot, including on my long cold drive home after the show, about how Colombari represents human collectively on stage. The 10-Lears structure, in which the actors pass around and share most of the King’s lines, makes the royal “we” into a very literal thing. Having all the actors wandering through the aisles and the audience brought our physical spaces together. The chorus-like incantation of some stray lines and a few longer speeches – I remember especially “Blow, winds” at the start of the storm, and the “Howl…oh, you are men of stones” speech after Cordelia’s death – capture something close to religious ritual through shared syllables. We were all there, in the storm, in our seats, morning the beloved daughter. In some ways I thought the mad king speeches in act 4, in which just one actor playing Lear sat on a chair next to one actor playing Gloucester, didn’t quite reach the same level of intensity. Some of the language in that scene is about the king’s magical body – “they cannot touch me for coining, I am the King himself” (4.6.84-85) – but in this production in particular, it felt to me as if it was the plural nature of the king that carried his authority.
I’m now trying to make sense of how the king’s plurality might connect to ideas of political order, and to my own personal obsession with the play’s representations of human vulnerability to natural forces, especially rain and wind. The elements that strike his old man’s body emphasize his solitary nature. So perhaps the collective voicing of the play’s language forms some kind of political and artistic? solidarity?
I’ll be back next Sunday for the 2 pm matinee, and then I’m bringing students on Thursday 2/5 near the end of the run. So I’m likely to have much more to say about this great production – including at a talkback I’m chairing next Sunday! More soon – but here’s the link for tickets: https://www.lamama.org/king-lear/.
On stage through Sunday Feb 8th!