King Lear

1-“O, do not love too long
Or you will grow out of fashion,
Like an old song.”

2-“A pity beyond all telling
Is hid in the heart of Love
The folk who are buying and selling
The clouds on their journey above
The cold, wet winds ever blowing
In the shadowy hazel grove
Where mouse grey waters are flowing
Threaten the head that I love.”

3-“But what if excess of Love
Bewildered them until they died?”

(All 3 by WB Yeats. 1-O Do Not Love Too Long, 2-The Pity of Love, 3-Easter 1916—as suggested by Harold Bloom in “Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human”)

I don't feel qualified to write about this or any production of King Lear. It exists on such as scale as a piece of literature that I literally am awestruck at the prospect of trying to unravel it. However the Goodman's recent production was so provocative and interesting that any survey of Chicago theater during the year 2006 that doesn't attempt to depict it is doing its readers a disservice. With that caveat, I'm happy to try to do so.

A few weeks ago, in the midst of a highfalutin conversation with a fellow UChicago alum about the virtues and downfalls of life in Chicago, we hit upon an interesting point: one of the liberating things about living here is the easygoing manner in which one can put forth political and social opinions without feeling ostracized for having crossed some line of political correctness. In other words, people in Chicago aren't so uptight.

On the other hand, we realized, talk in Chicago is very cheap. Contrast this with the atmosphere in Washington, DC, the city in which I was born, and in which my sister works as a congressional aide. A few weeks ago, while out drinking beers with her coworkers, I immediately felt the difference. I was a novelty because I would brashly pontificate on any political or social subject without feeling worried about saying the wrong thing. These people work in an environment in which arguments made today affect opinions tomorrow, which affect policy for the most power nation on earth. The sense of responsibility and power surrounding words is awesome.

Why is talk so cheap in Chicago? We posited that the nature of politics in this city made it so. You could make all the arguments you wanted about policy, but this is a machine city, based on neighborhood ethnic and other organizations in which loyalty and blood are invested in authorities who make decisions about the perceived best-good for their constituents. Tocqueville it ain't. But Chicago is decently run, I suppose, even if offices are handed down from father and son and from paisan to paisan.

Robert Falls' production of King Lear is set, in time for the Borat movie, in a repressive Eastern/Central European dictatorship. As we enter the theater, Stacey Keach's (Lear) Charles Foster Kane-like portrait looms down on the house. Lear is hailed in song at the opening banquet as “papa”.

For a while throughout the first two acts, questions of the design conceit nagged at me: why was it necessary to place Lear in such a setting? I made a connection, and I wonder at its validity, but here goes: Lear's kingdom is ruled as Chicago is, on the basis of ethnic or tribal organizations that are connected directly to families. In other words, it is a society organized around the love that holds a family together. I am loyal to my neighborhood ethnic group, just as I am to my family. And as I am loyal to my ethnicity, I am loyal to our political boss. Lear is papa, just as, for many Chicago Irish in the 50s, Daley was papa. It's a family affair, and arguments don't count for as much here as elsewhere. When Todd Stroger is set to inherit his father's office, with precious little democratic imprimatur, the atmosphere is pertinent.

Given such a political environment, the rationale for setting Lear, the consummate play about the nature of love and loving, in such a state is apparent, even if this diminishes its effect somewhat. If familial love is the glue that holds this society together, what happens when that love turns tragic?

In King Lear, the answer is simple: War. Robert Falls' production is a visual feast in this regard, and he creates events and images in dialogue with Shakespeare's text that are gripping, haunting, and frankly, distracting from the text itself. That it was difficult for me to follow the meditations of Lear and Gloucester thanks to the feast of ideas profferred by the design is both a detraction and a note of high praise for this ambitious production.

One other question nagged at me after seeing the production: If Lear is a Milosevic-type torturer, murderer, etc., then why should I care if his daughters steal from him? If these are archetypes of trashy European gangsterdom, then why should I feel for them? In the text, the play is set generations before King Arthur, a mythological setting in which Lear is at worst benign (though tragically flawed) and at best a just old King. From a revisionist perspective we of course know all about authoritarian rulers and the torture that underpins them, but I cannot say I think that the text is eager to paint Lear as a Stalinist leader. I believe that we are supposed to feel him to be a full and just papa.

Harold Bloom posits that Lear defies criticism. In my mind this is true because love and our need for it spring from such a deep and unknown place within us, in which all of our basic emotional beliefs about ourselves and our validity and value as human beings live. As someone who's recently been brutally dumped, I can speak from personal experience: Lear is an abstration in which we see our own love. Why does Lear need the over the top reassurance of his daughters? Why is Edgar so naïve in his faith in his brother's love for him? Why can't Edmund feel any love whatsoever, and does this give him the power to direct the events in the play? Why do Goneril and Regan need him so passionately, and why do they destroy themselves for him? And what do “father”, “mother”, and “lover” mean to us?

This production treats these questions abstractly—that is to say that our experience of love informs our reading of these motivations. If I associate the Citizen Kane portrait with brutality, that is MY reading of the design. As an audience we are never lead deeply into the text to find the answers. But I found some moments of the play tremendously moving as a confluence of images and personal associations with them. As a visual comment on the text and as a work of art, the play worked magnificently.

The show opens in a fabulous banquet hall, covered by Lear's image. Facing us is a men's urinal attended to by a woman whose job is possibly the worst in all of the kingdom. The strains of 50s era Slavic songs, in the vein of Yeats' out-of-fashion songs play from an old radio. Is it 1955 or 2005? It's not immediately clear. As Gloucester, Edmund and Kent (Edward Gero, Steve Pickering, and Jonno Roberts) relieve themselves, Edmund's status as a bastard is made clear, as is the wear and age of the ruling class. Their bathroom is worn and as we watch them piss, we find them to be worn. In a beautifully constructed act of generousity, the soon-to-be villainous Edmund leaves the beleaguered bathroom attendant a huge tip.

We find ourselves in a breathtaking gold banquet hall lined with red linen. The guests enter—a trashy bunch of European gangster-types, with ugly, tacky hair and clothes, getting down to the new music—European dance hall hip-hop, spun by none other than Oswald, Goneril's steward and lover. He preens on his stand costumed in saggy pants and protruding boxer shorts, and the best knockoff hip-hop fashions. He beat-boxes, spins and raps and runs the party. AK-47s wave, vodka is gulped. The king is introduced.

Lear enters in a fabulous light blue suit, gladhanding and backslapping like a charismatic pro. He shakes hands and kisses his daughters—Goneril in gaudy purple sequin, Regan pretty in pink. He sits beside Cordelia, who, in blue jeans, rather resembles Jeanine Garofalo's character from The Truth About Dogs and Cats. In a shocking event that further confirms Lear's status as a brutal dictator, he jokingly pulls out an enormous pistol and mocks shooting himself, only to subsequently shoot at the ceiling. He wheels out a cake, representing his kingdom, and professing to divest himself of rule, would carve it up to give his lands to his daughter. He takes the mic and, in the spirit of a drunken wedding toast gone awry, asks which daughter loves him best.

Goneril a redhead, in a demure fashion, well-suggested by her evening gown, takes the mic and professes effusively. Regan a blond, as suggested by her prissy, girlish dress, plays dumbly at following her sister's act. Cordelia the brunette, lacking concern with appearances in the first place, refuses to play along.

Falls' take on this scene seems to be that the refusal to maintain appearances is what sets the action of the play in motion. This is a cogent point within the design framework of the piece, as we certainly sense the way in which apostate politicians are routinely destroyed for not towing a party line. So there seemed to be a contemporary resonance in the microphone wielding PR failure. But for me, the question of love and Lear's overabundance in it and need for it could have been addressed in a much more intimate manner. However, I had to appreciate the spirit of the interpretation—the coercion of someone with a microphone forcing one to say something.

At Cordelia's refusal, Lear becomes incenced, cuts her off from an inheritance and stabs the cake. Kent, for attempting to reason with Lear is nearly murdered before our eyes. The scene closes with Burgundy's refusal to accept Cordelia as a mate without a dowry, and France's acceptance of her, as “she is herself a dowry.”

We are then introduced to the Edmund, whose conservative gray suit is a welcome relief from the gaudiness we've just witnessed. This is the young man who tipped the bathroom attendant. We don't think of him as a villain, and this is another beautifully executed aspect of the production—Edmund seems perfectly humane as a potential ruler. We see him set his plan to usurp his father's lands into action—as his father falls for Edmund's lies, hook, line and sinker. Directly following, we see his brother, dressed similarly to Oswald, buying coke from Oswald at the DJ stand. Our white, middle class audience thinks to itself: “Who's the bastard around here?” Joaquin Torres' Ed Grimley-esque portrayal of the naïve Edgar gives us a visceral sense of the injustice that Edmund experiences and that drives him. Roberts' performance as the cool-headed villain Edmund sings. We are literally putty in his loveless hands.

There is, however, a flip-side to this portrayal of things. Edgar is almost so adolescent and naïve that it becomes difficult to see the possibility of his becoming the mature avenger of the final act. As a stylistic touch to set the audiences sensibility, it works. It doesn't necessarily agree with the text.

The play is filled many such touches. We viscerally experience Goneril's lust as we witness Oswald performing oral sex on her and her throwing him off her in the midst of sex, with obvious blue-balls. The commentary on her nature as a lover is explicit.

We are then introduced to a Sid Caeser-esque personality, the fool, one of Shakespeare's most baffling characters. Lear refers to him in the text as a child, and he refers to Lear almost exclusively as “Nuncle.” He appears to us as a character out of Pirandello or Beckett, with white clown makeup on, a sort of 50s avant-garde jester. At the fool's witty comic commentary, without which he has denied Cordelia her inheritance, he vows to retake the shape of a King, even as his daughters move to disarm him of his knights (in this production, they are police in riot gear).

As the play progresses, we see the conflict deepen into civil war. Some amazing design touches—an early model Benz filled with cigarette smoke pulls onto stage and Regan, trailed by a line of Luis Vuitton luggage enters Gloucester's home (girded dazzlingly by a huge iron gate). Kent, after getting into a second scrape on Lear's behalf is duct-taped, stuffed into two tires, covered with gasoline, and nearly lit ablaze. The danger of the moment was palpable.

As we face Edgar's exile, we see him strip down to his ridiculous red underwear and take to the underground sewer, below the stage. As Lear orders Kent freed from the tires, in which he's been trapped all night, he is revealed to be a blustering old man, growling and shouting, but no longer capable of inflicting fear. As Edgar descends into madness, and disguise himself as the lowest street urchin (Poor Tom), we see Lear begin to do the same. As the storm hits, and the metaphysical reality of Lear's and Edgar rejection becomes clear, we see them rant at the thunder. We see Edgar running around naked. Gimme Shelter, perhaps the ultimate music of foreboding, and recently used again cinematically in The Departed plays as they dance naked in the rain and thunder—literally disdaining shelter in their madness. Following their exile to Dover, we never see the Fool again, and from this production we can only assume that he is another victim of the civil war.

We see Cornwall smoke crack from Edmund's gun, in alliance with his recent takeover of Gloucester's estate. We see trash fall from the sky into Lear's new domicile, and a mock trial in which Regan is compared to a used bidet. Gloucester leads the exiled party to Dover to run from the Lear's warring daughters.

Following intermission we find ourselves in Gloucester's home, and in a a jarring event, see his eyes pulled out by Cornwall, Regan's husband, played as a Michael Chikliss-looking thug by (Christopher Genebach). In the text, Gloucester's eyes are gouged out by a boot. In this production, we see them brutally wrenched from his head. Poetically the point is clear—Love's tragedy is both Gloucester's blindness and Lear's madness. In the text, Cornwall is wounded by a servant loyal to Gloucester (he later dies, off-stage). In this production, Cornwall is strangled to death by Edgar (with a tie!), in what might seem to be an immediate act of revenge for the blinding. He makes love to Regan, the new widow, directly following.

We are then transported to a burned-out, smoldering cityscape. Edgar, as Poor Tom, finds his blind father, and leads him, without revealing himself. We subsequently see Goneril's husband Albany (Kevin Gudahl, who will soon appear as Uncle Vanya in Court's production) rape Goneril from behind, in an ugly attempt to wrench power from her. She laughs.

Cordelia leads masked, Al-qaeda looking stormtroops in a flak jacket. Oswald is nearly seduced by Regan as he delivers her a letter from her sister. Between these interactions we see, in the background, Gloucester and son wandering toward Dover. That loyalty is the backdrop of what transpires. It is this visual journey of these two that informs our understanding of Edgar's progress from child to King-to-be.

Lear enters as a bum in long, filthy white beard, with a roll-cart behind him. He meets Gloucester, and in a fantastic growl, impersonates “a dog obeyed in his office.” The French army arrives, and claims Lear. Oswald finds and captures Gloucester and then is summarily shot in shockingly cold blood by Edgar.

Roberts, as Edmunds, oozes with cold blood in the “Which of them shall I take” monologue, which Falls sets between the two sisters on either side of him. Lear and Cordelia are reconciled as Lear, freshened and all in white is seen in restraints in a wheelchair. Falls' equation of Lear with a contemporary homeless person reads clearly. In perhaps the most indelible image of the piece, we see Gloucester in the midst of dozens of corpses dragged on stage by the ensemble, and dumped into a pit. Although Shakespeare denies his audience Gloucester's recognition of his son, Falls gives it to us in the midst of the mass-grave. Gloucester falls dead upon such recognition, and is dumped into the pit with the other victims.

The question arising from a reading of the play might be: Why does Edgar conceal himself from his father for so long? This production asks the question: Is Gloucester's death of the same nature as the countless other victims of this civil war?

In the midst of an ever-widening post-apocalyptic scene, Albany embraces Edgar, and challenges Edmund. Edgar challenges Edmund, and much as he did Oswald, shoots him coldly. The finality of gunshots leaves a mark on the audience. Edgar has become someone capable of the most final and definitive destructive act. Goneril, rather than poisoning, strangles her sister to death with a plastic bag. Subsequently, she, in a shockingly final moment of her own shoots herself in the head, as huge warm lights escalate behind the action toward the plays conclusion.

I didn't feel that Edmund's progress to troubled contrition read very clearly, but after witnessing a series of events such as the audience witnesses after the intermission, it isn't hard to understand why. We are numb from the violence and war, and the evolution of Edmund's character is peanuts by comparison. In the end, Edgar's triumph lives in this light—he wins, but in the light of such brutality is it any victory to be savored? Edgar's final words, as he grabs the mic (back to scene 1) is to implore us to “speak what we feel, not what we ought.” Falls' message, on the expression of love publicly and the dangers of love as a social fabric comes through clearly.

I was exhillerated by this production—warts and all. For its deficits, it does something that one doesn't often see in theater in this town: engage in a conversation with the text and highlight events to diverge from a traditional, balanced rendering. As a piece of contemporary art, it works.

Stacy Keach is thrilling as Lear, even if the nuances of his performance are overshadowed by the scale Falls' design. Keach's growling, snarling, blustering Lear is a character that, along with this production, I will never forget.

Yeats' theme, in harmony with the text of Lear, is that the tragedy of excessive love turns us into static, stone-like creatures, around whom the world swirls, as we sit oblivious to the torment surrounding us. In this production, we find ourselves in our security and our personal sense of love turned to stone, as the swirl of civil war unfolds around us. When the play expires, we live through the pathos of the living human beings on stage whose love left them incapable of mastering those changes, and we are left wondering at the extent to which love can make victims of us all.