"That Way Madness Lies" - a review of "King Lear" at USC's Drayton Hall

"The real difficulty with Lear is that you've got to play him all, you know, shaky legs and pratfalls and the dentures coming out, 'cause he's ancient as hell, and then there's that heartrending scene when he goes right off his nut, you know, 'bliddle dee dee diddle deebibble dee dee dibble beep beep beep,' and all that, which takes it out of you, what with having the crown to keep on. So Lear is tiring, although not difficult to act, because you've only got to do despair and a bit of anger, and they're the easiest."

~ John Cleese, Monty Python's Matching Tie and Handkerchief (1973)

Theatre South Carolina tackles that "most difficult of Shakespearean tragedies," as program notes for USC's King Lear admit up front, adding Peter Brook's description of the play as a "dramatic mountain whose summit had never been reached."  Inventive and daring choices in staging and interpretation create some hits as well as misses, but a talented crop of first-year MFA students in leading roles make for an entertaining and thought-provoking evening of classic theatre.

Full disclosure:  Lear is not a favorite of mine, and I've never seen it live, only a filmed performance with Laurence Olivier and Diana Rigg in the '80's.  Still, I spent much of the spring of senior year in high school with my buddy Greg, researching term papers; his topic was the madness of Lear, mine was the motivation of Iago, and we helped each other as we taught ourselves research and character analysis while sneaking into Thomas Cooper. Greg's conclusion, off the record and indicative of the era, was that Lear was "a crazy old, fish-eyed fool." Decades later, I think he may have had a point.  Still, let me say up front that I recommend this show highly, and varying interpretations that lead to discussion are what Shakespeare is all about.

Lear tells parallel stories of fathers and children, madness and betrayal. Acknowledging his advancing years, the King intends to split his kingdom among three daughters, disowning the youngest when she declines to try to top her sisters' overly-effusive declarations of how much they love him. Meanwhile, loyal vassal Gloucester (Terry Snead) has likewise been betrayed, as his bastard son Edmund (Cory Lipman) frames legitimate son and heir Edgar (Josiah Laubenstein) as a conspirator.  Guest director Cristian Hadji-Culea, Scenic Designers Nic Uluru and William Love, and costumer Sean Smith have re-imagined Iron Age Britain into a modern-dress, urban setting, which often makes strong visual and thematic statements that help clarify plot and context.  As Lear, guest artist James Keegan excels at making the tricky blank verse understandable to the audience. Keegan's Lear is a vigorous man of middle years, however, and has few signs of dementia in early scenes. Eccentric, yes, foolish, yes, temperamental unquestionably, but at moments when the text suggests he may not recognize his daughter, Keegan plays these as broad jokes. This is a valid interpretation, and likely one developed with the director, but I just wasn't buying it.  A key figure is the Fool, often a voice of reason and insight in Shakespeare.  Kate Dzvonik gives an excellent, energetic performance, but here the character is depicted as a broadly comic, (and to me, annoying) clown-like music hall performer. Keegan's Lear really, really seems to appreciate this schtick, and when his own madness kicks into high gear, that's what he channels: not so much noble, pitiable madness, but goofy, John Belushi-like pratfalls and nonsensical prancing and singing.  As above, this is a quite legitimate take on the material, but I found myself wishing for some easier explanation.  In a film, one could zoom in on a bottle of anti-psychotic meds that Lear has cast away, which would explain everything, including his miraculous recovery after a day or two of rest.  Here, one just has to enjoy Keegan's vitality and enthusiasm, and remember that Lear is indeed a difficult play for some to appreciate. That said, I'd love to see Keegan take this same characterization as use it as Didi or Gogo in Waiting for Godot.

Leeanna Rubin as Goneril and Melissa Peters as Regan, Lear's villainous daughters, are superb. Until we see their truly dark natures, both seem quite reasonable, their "betrayal" of their father nothing more than wanting to reduce his retinue of knights, who are brawling, drinking, eating the kingdom out of house and home, i.e. carrying on much like their liege. The equivalent of taking Meemaw's keys away, but Lear will have none of it, storming off to the barren heath (here re-imagined as alleyways and abandoned warehouses) in a royal hissy fit.  "She struck me with her tongue, most serpent-like" is about all Lear can legitimately gripe about.  Rubin is a commanding presence on stage, appealing and even sexy, in a tie-you-down-and-hurt-you sort of way. Her interaction with Lipman blurs the lines between plotting, domestic violence, and foreplay.  Her costumes also reveal much about the character:  first she wears an elegant evening dress, which quickly is traded for a sort of practical riding-dress with leggings underneath, and finally slacks, boots, and a fierce, fur-lined vest.

Peters is much tinier, and uses her size for inventive moments of physicality, leaping onto men in passion or in rage. It's no spoiler to reveal that as in most tragedies, all the bad guys die, as do most of the good guys, and a flaw in the text is that so many of them do so off stage.  Here Hadji-Culea brilliantly allows us to see Goneril and Regan's last moments.  Rubin goes out with quite a bang, and I could only recall James Purefoy's line from the HBO series Rome: "Now THAT was an exit."

A highlight was a special-effects-enhanced storm; rapid little blips of light were projected onto a scrim, and the result was like something straight out of graphic novels (and their movie incarnations) like Sin City or Watchmen. That combined with a visually striking depiction of an alleyway, seen from an odd angle, made me want James Costello, playing loyal retainer Kent disguised in pull-down mask, to raspily mutter, Rorschach-style,  "Kent's Journal: a king went mad tonight."

So many aspects of the contemporary production design worked:

- Trey Hobbs, as the milder, gentler Albany, dresses in a sweater and glasses, perfectly summing up the character's nature. - good-and-bad brothers Laubenstein and Lipman are first seen in a natty summer suit and a leather jacket respectively, again making a perfect contrast. - plot exposition among wealthy characters takes place on a country club golf course. - a reference to trumpets in the distance becomes a car horn. - Edgar, disguised as a mad beggar, is depicted as a homeless man wrapped in trash bags, and the "cave" where he takes shelter becomes a dumpster. - awesome wind effects blow random trash across the stage in the middle of the storm. - overturned trash cans signify the decline and decay of Lear's kingdom. - Lear breaks his crown in half, and the pieces handily become tiaras for his daughters. - police sirens in the distance often signify a battle offstage, or a manhunt for a character on the run. - Kent wearing multiple layers of clothing and toting a sleeping bag as he and Lear seek refuge in an abandoned building likewise establish tone and setting. - massive brick columns anchor both sides of the stage (at least until one actor accidentally brushed up against one, revealing them to mainly be a painted design on fabric - but the illusion was perfect until then.)

A few things didn't work at all:

- three extra actors appearing as multiple visions of the Fool, to signify Lear's delusion; great idea, but distracting. - a couple of fights using golf clubs in lieu of swords. - many of the fight scenes in general.  The cast needs to sit down and watch an hour of pro wrestling, because an actor really can strike someone without hurting them, but here punches, slaps, and slashes to the throat rarely connect, and seem pantomimed. - the blinding of Gloucester, which should be vastly more horrific, and painful for the character. That said, Regan's dive into the fray is terrific and believable; playing golf with one of the eyeballs, maybe not so much. - Lear breaks his crown, his scepter, a ceremonial orb ...and everything neatly splits in two, just a little too conveniently. - sound and music cues often drowned out crucial moments of exposition at the end of scenes, and an off-stage microphone that was cranked up to 11, nearly deafening the audience at one point.  (Disclaimer: I saw a preview, and that has surely been fixed.) - moments of flamboyant exuberance that caused many of the students in the audience to laugh when there really wasn't anything funny going on.

At this point, one might ask "If you didn't like it, why spend so much time talking about it?"  Which is the point - a solid 90% of this show (which ran about 3 hours including a generous intermission) really impressed me, a triumph given that I'm not wild about the material. Someone else could easily love everything I didn't care for, and rank King Lear among Shakespeare's best.  Either way, the visual design from Uluru and Love, and the work of some remarkable young actors, made this production memorable for me.

So go see it, and you be the judge.  King Lear runs through Sat. April 27th at USC's Drayton Hall.

~ August Krickel

James Keegan reflects on playing King Lear at USC

Theatre South Carolina will stage Shakespeare's revered tragedy King Lear, the epic tale of a ruler's loss of power and descent into madness, April 19-27 at USC's Drayton Hall Theatre.  Continuing a tradition of reinventing the "look" of classic plays to augment their timlessness and relevance to modern audiences, guest director Cristian Hadji-Culea (Director General of the National Theatre of Iasi, Romania) and Obie Award-winning  scenic designer and USC professor Nic Uluru depict Lear as the head of a major corporation, who finds his immense power and sense of entitlement challenged when his authority is usurped by two of his daughters. Joining a cast of USC undergraduate and graduate theatre students are guest artists Terry Snead, Park Bucker, Paul Kaufmann, and, in the title role, professional actor James Keegan, who has worked with the Folger Shaksepeare Theatre in Wshington, DC, and the Blackfriars Playhouse at the American Shakespeare Center in Virginia.   Mr. Keegan graciously took time to share some thoughts on this challenging role and production. Jasper :  How did you become involved in this production of King Lear, at USC?

James Keegan:   I recently worked with Robert Richmond, a theater professor here at USC, on a production of Shakespeare’s Henry V at The Folger Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, DC; Gary Logan, who directed a production here at USC last year served as dialect coach for that production.  Gary is the head of the Academy of Classical Acting MFA program at The George Washington University; both my son and daughter-in-law took their MFA degrees at that program, where they were fortunate to have Gary as a teacher, mentor, and friend.  The last time I played the title role in King Lear was in 2009 at The American Shakespeare Center; in that production my son, Thomas, played Burgundy and the Doctor, and my later-to-be daughter-in-law, Alyssa Wilmoth-Keegan, played Cordelia.  I suspect Gary had heard about the production from Tom and Alyssa, so that when Robert Richmond asked Gary if he knew of an actor who might play Lear in the USC production, Gary felt he knew enough to recommend me.  I like to think that my work with Robert also helped to convince him I might do the job well.  As all these crossovers suggest, the classical theatre world is a small one, and in this case—as in others—that has worked to my advantage.

Jasper :  Often an actor will bring some new insight or perspective to a role that he or she has played before.  Anything in particular that you are anticipating in playing Lear this time around?

Keegan: When I last played Lear, my father had already passed away at the age of 86—in his waning years, I had watched him become physically compromised by a stroke, and that experience was certainly part of my 2009 performance.  Since that time, my mother too has died, experiencing some dementia in the final year of her life, and I have lost other older friends, including a great teacher and mentor, the poet W.D. Snodgrass, who was a lion of a man, but who also had one of the most tender and generous hearts it has been my privilege to encounter.  I like to think that the best of "De" is part of my Lear.

Also, the last time I played Lear, it was in a production that was set in the medieval era, and this time around the setting is contemporary and corporate. I should note, however, that our director, Cristian Hadji-Culea, wants also to keep a sense that the world of the play is timeless, so there will be some anachronistic elements thrown in—for instance, it is planned that in an early scene in which I am dressed in a business suit, I will also be wearing a hawking glove (something from the old aristocratic world) on one hand.  Also, the cut of the play is different; Cristian seems to want to emphasize a more modern philosophical world for the play.  In Shakespeare’s original conception, the play is pre-Christian, and therefore there are many references to the gods as a power; in the contemporary setting, those references seem out-of-place, and therefore they are largely cut, or viewed as performative and ironic.

Finally, new director, new cast mates, that’s the excitement always—seeing what other actors will bring to the stage and within what concepts and structures I will be challenged to bring to life the character.  I want to learn and be shown what I didn’t know about the character and about the play and about myself.

Jasper :  Lear is one of the great tragic roles – recently you also played Pistol, a memorable but smaller role in Henry V.  Actors in college chomp at the bit to get the primo roles, but so often professional performers who have been around for a while have no problem doing supporting roles, whether for the challenge of creating a character with less material, or to be part of a good ensemble doing good work, or just to have a break from so much time on stage.  Any thoughts on this?

Keegan:  I suppose I should quote the old adage that there are no small roles, only small actors, but there are roles that are so small that, at this stage in my life and career, I would not take them.  The decision to accept a contract is a combination of some of the things you have mentioned: a great role (whether lead or featured—Pistol is a marvelous character in Henry V and the play’s representative, with Fluellen, of the common man at war); a fine ensemble of actors; an effective and collaborative director; a theater where one enjoys working or where one has long wished to work.

Playing Pistol, for instance, I never thought of the role as small because the character is clearly so important to Shakespeare, for he draws him so lovingly and so fully.  Pistol is a braggart soldier and therefore he may be called a stereotypical character, but Shakespeare sets him down inside an actual military campaign, where we see his cowardice, his hopes, his losses. In the production I just did at the Folger, the director, Robert Richmond highlighted Pistol’s narrative line, so that he became a kind of counterbalance to King Henry: the young king is victorious and rises and gains, just as Pistol is defeated, and watches his friends and his fortunes fall.

Furthermore, I have worked for thirteen seasons at The American Shakespeare Center, where the season involves five plays presented in true rotating repertory, so that a dozen actors in the company are playing all the roles in every play, ad presenting a different play every night. This means that while I may play a big role in two of the plays, I am likely to play several small roles in the other plays.  For example, in the 2012 Summer and Fall seasons there, I played two big roles—Henry II in James Goldman’s The Lion in Winter, and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, and then I played much smaller roles in the three other shows—Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which I played Antonio, who has half a scene, and Outlaw #1 (need I say more?); King John, in which I played Hubert, a beautiful but minor character, and James Gurney, who appears in half a scene and says nothing; Cymbeline, in which I played King Cymbeline, who, in spite of giving his name to the play’s title is a fairly flat and un-engaging character, and whose daughter, Imogen, is the true center of the play.  Such work serves to curb the ego and to remind me of how important all the characters are to the full and effective telling of the story.  And the clear and engaging telling of the story is, of course, the foremost responsibility and concern of the theater professional. 

Jasper : So many of us may recall Shakespeare as a burdensome assignment from English class, yet in his day Shakespeare was about as popular a form of mass entertainment as there was (and was even looked down on by some of his peers as not being cultured enough.)  Certainly the visual elements of this production will help with accessibility to modern audiences, but as an actor what challenges do you face to make the play, and the role, relevant and meaningful?

Keegan: Shakespeare’s great plays are always relevant, for they deal with the great human themes: love, ambition, family ties, leadership, responsibility, vengeance, forgiveness, redemption.  I am an educator too, so I have taught Shakespeare in the classroom to my students at The University of Delaware.  It is unfortunate to my mind that most American students receive their first introduction to Shakespeare in the high school classroom.  Don’t mistake me, I have great respect for the high school teachers I know and work with, but Shakespeare wrote in a poetic style and in a modern English that had some usages that we do not retain (use of “thee” and “thou,” for instance), and, more importantly, Shakespeare wrote for the stage, not for the page.  The language of the plays was to be accompanied with action, and most any audience member will tell you that he or she understands and remembers much more what is done (the action) than what is said (the text.)

That said, I think Lear works particularly well in a modern setting—for I think it is a fundamentally modern play.  It creates a world where goodness has a rough time of it, where externals and words are valued and privileged over the spiritual and over actions.  How often in our culture of the lobbyist and the sound bite do we see language abused?  How often do we see individuals tried in the media? We grow cynical about our leaders, about moral rectitude, about love itself.  But we are so ready to come back!  Many of us are so ready to shrug off that cynicism, are so prepared—like Kent, and like Cordelia—to believe still or to believe again in the nobility and goodness of our fellows, even if it costs us everything finally.  Anyway, that’s what I believe, and it seems to me that that is what Shakespeare believes in King Lear.  The play always reminds me of something I read once in Miguel de Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life: paraphrased, it goes something like this: if it turns out in the end that there is no God, we should live in such a way that that will have been an injustice.  The play reminds us that we must “see feelingly” if we have any hope of seeing the truth of ourselves, and that we must “speak what we feel, not what we ought to say,” if we have any hope of having fruitful community with one another.

Oh, and, for the record, I have never ever wanted a break from time on stage.  So far, anyway.

Jasper :  The roots of Lear's motivations, and his madness, have been debated for centuries, everything from dementia to bi-polar disorder to general orneriness and stubbornness. Any hints or clues as to what we will see in this production?

Keegan:  This production seems to me to lean toward the ornery and stubborn side so far.  Later in the play, when Lear is abandoned by his family and stripped of his followers and wandering in the storm, that ornery and stubborn nature gets pushed to an extreme and Lear suffers a psychic break—a kind of dementia.

However, as in any dementia, he has extremely lucid moments that lead him to a deeper self-discovery and a profound understanding of the treacherous nature of valuing quantitatively as opposed to qualitatively.  He has learned to make something of nothing, though at the outset of the play he could not see how to do this because he, like his counterpart Gloucester, saw only in superficial terms.

Now, Gloucester, having gone into blindness and despair, and Lear, having gone beyond the rational into the mad logic of his Fool, have achieved what they lacked in the play’s opening scenes: insight and profound knowledge of themselves and the harsh world where love still resides and where those who truly love us stick by us no matter how we may have wronged them in our blindness and in our arrogance and in our self-centered folly.

Jasper :  Given that you are only in Columbia for a few weeks - what is your impression of the theatre program at USC?  And have you had a chance to get a feel for the greater community, either as a place for the arts, or just as a place to live, work, and study?

Keegan:  My exposure to the theatre program at USC has been fundamentally through my work with the MFA actors and some of the undergrad students in the program, and I have to say that that experience—especially with the grad students, with whom I have been working most closely--speaks well of the program as a whole.  The class of MFA actors speaks well of the faculty in that whoever put these eight young artists together managed to assemble a truly supportive working group: the most impressive feature of working with James Costello, Kate Dzvonik, Trey Hobbs, Josiah Laubenstein, Cory Lipman, Melissa Peters, Laurie Roberts, and Leanna Rubin is that they genuinely seem to like, care about, and encourage one another.

I am glad to be part of their introduction to working with classical theater, and I hope to have some classroom time with them soon to discuss in greater depth some of the challenges of and techniques for working with Shakespeare and his contemporaries.  I have been impressed as well to see their attention and patience in the rehearsal room.  We are working with Cristian Hadji-Culea, a fine director with very clear ideas about how he views the world of the play, but also a director from a different theater culture than ours and one who has some limitations with English.  They have continually worked to realize his vision of the play—I admire actors who say “Yes,” and see the challenges they are being offered not as obstacles, but as opportunities to learn and to grow.  When one is working hard with emotional material, one can easily grow impatient with such challenges; what I have seen in rehearsal are actors who are willing to release ego and embrace new possibilities.

I like Columbia very much.  I recently spent the afternoon in your lovely museum of art.  As an undergraduate at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, I always loved going to the Worcester Art Museum, and when I worked in Pittsburgh several years ago I was a regular visitor to the Carnegie Museum of Art near the theater where I was working.  The great thing about these museums as compared to the Metropolitan in New York City, where I grew up, or the National Gallery in Washington, DC, which I visit with some frequency, is that they are what I call  “afternoon” museums—smaller city museums with fine collections that you can visit over several afternoons and feel like you are getting a feel for the entire collection and the ideas of its curators.  The larger museums can be overwhelming to me, and I have to limit myself to seeing only a set number of galleries or pieces on a given visit.  But it is so wonderful in museums like Columbia’s to spend an afternoon and see everything that is currently on display.  I also very much liked the current exhibit of Impressionist art, particularly for several Bonnard canvases—he is a favorite of mine, and one especially beautiful John Singer Sargent painting, from when the artist was 24 and just starting to make a name for himself.

I am also a runner, and although the spring has been a bit cold these past few weeks, I have availed myself of your nearby parks.  I love the run along the river and canal here in the city (I have yet to see any gators though) and the trails through Sesquicentennial Park and Dreher Island Park, where I really need to get a cabin with my wife some time—it is so beautiful out there.  Finally, I’ve found some pretty good sushi in town and that always makes me happy! I could definitely see myself returning were someone to ask (too subtle?)

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Show times for King Lear are 8 PM Wednesdays-Fridays, 7 PM Saturdays, and 3 PM on the first Sunday.  There is an additional half-price late night performance on Saturday, April 27 at 11 PM.   Tickets for the production are $12 for students, $16 for USC faculty/staff, military personnel and seniors 60+, and $18 for the general public.  Tickets can be purchased by calling 803-777-2551 or by visiting the Longstreet Theatre box office, which is open Monday-Friday, 12:30pm-5:30pm, beginning Friday, April 12.

For more information on King Lear or the theatre program at the University of South Carolina, please contact Kevin Bush via email at bushk@mailbox.sc.edu or by phone at (803) 777-9353.

~ August Krickel