Every inch a masterpiece

Start with one ever-so-human flaw and give it power. Watch it grow and spiral outward, creating a vortex that pulls everything down with it. There you have King Lear, subject of what many scholars agree is Shakespeare’s greatest and most complex tragedy, “one of the supreme achievements of the human imagination.”

A play of this magnitude needs to be matched with a director, a cast and crew, a hosting theatre to do it justice. And so “King Lear,” as envisioned by the Tony award-winning director Robert Falls from Chicago’s Goodman Theatre stage, comes to the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Harmon Hall.

In the long, thoughtful process that brought this production to fruition, Falls needed something more than just a clever and different placement for Lear’s doomed country. He found the answer in the bloody fall of the former Yugoslavia, a story of power rages and bitter division that ultimately undid the unifying life’s work of President-For-Life Tito. This comparison is made with just the right touch; it brings a modern and immediate sensibility without straining to coordinate every detail. The primary difference being that Tito tried to keep the factions together — Lear set in motion the machinery that tore his country apart.

The powerful hub on which this wheel turns is Stacy Keach who crowns a long, successful career on stage and television with the performance of a lifetime. King Lear is the actor’s ultimate balancing act: entitlement with frailty, keen lucidity with impassioned madness. The degeneration is steady and heartbreaking, the tattered remnants of an abdicated authority cling about him even as he raves in his nakedness in the storm. Keach’s handling of the role, fearless and intelligent, is a dream come true.

Splendid in his baby blue business suit, the king enters a gaudy dance and dinner party complacently prepared to divide up the kingdom among his three daughters as easily as he cuts large slices of the celebratory cake. Daughters Goneril (Kim Martin-Cotten) and Regan (Kate Arrington) have the sharp predatory beauty of wildcats, and casually draped in luxurious fur, each delivers the hyperbolic love declaration that their foolish old father is looking for. Backed by their rapacious husbands Albany (Andrew Long) and Cornwall (Chris Genebach), the sisters in this setting of mindless greed see the way cleared for a glorious clawing to the top.

Laura Odeh as Cordelia, modest and simply dressed, sets up the plays first great contrast not only with her sisters, but also with her response to her father’s demand. If the king comes off like a celebrity game show host, Cordelia is the guest contestant who refuses to play. Banishment, as everyone knows, is her reward. Only France (Aubrey Deeker) and Kent (Steve Pickering) risk the thwarted old man’s fury by defending her integrity, and nothing good can come of that.

Falls’ darkly swashbuckling vision makes it clear that poisons were lurking in the mud all along, just waiting for the moment to hatch out. Conspicuous among them is the bastard Edmund in a chilling performance by Jonno Roberts. Not since Iago has a conniving nature wreaked so much havoc on others — from the desperate Poor Tom disguise of his brother Edward (brilliantly played by Joaquin Torres) to Cornwall’s vicious blinding of Edmund’s father, Gloucester, (Edward Gero) helplessly caught in the political maelstrom. “I stumbled when I saw” — one of the simplest of heart breaking moments when the blind father reaches for the arm of the son he has wronged but can’t recognize.

Everything about Walt Spangler’s scene design delivers a sense of magnitude: wide, thundering skies, monstrous evil, towering destruction that takes us from the palaces of the undeserving to a seething battleground that looks like the world’s final landfill. Contrast ramps up the effect. An ear-splitting battle is followed by the poignant chants for the dead sung by the unseen as mummy wrapped bodies are dragged into place.

Yet it is the simplicity of conflicting emotion that puts it on a human scale. There’s both humor and pathos in Lear, a fleeting realization of his own hand in his downfall before the headlong embrace of madness. Howard Witt plays the king’s fool with touching subtlety — sadness for his fallen and disgraced master, yet direct in his wit and observations — because that’s his job. Nakedness comes with derangement and desperation, sex with lust for power.

A passing comment between Goneril and Regan in Act I acknowledges the ground on which everything else is built — and destroyed. “...He hath ever but slenderly known himself.” From that flaw does King Lear decide to give away the kingdom and retire in luxury, playing the king but not being one. Because of that flaw the kingdom is split from top to bottom taking stability, sanity, and lives with it.

Falls’ interpretation of this great tragedy is bound for the thin air where immortal productions live on. It’s being held over one extra week and many performances are sold out. My advice to lovers of classical theatre — do whatever you have to do to see it.

Margaret Lawrence is a member of the American Theatre Critics Association. She teaches English and drama at CCHS.

Want to go?
What: “King Lear”
Where: Shakespeare Theatre Co.  Harmon Hall, Washington D.C.
Call: (202) 547-1122 or visit ShakespeareTheatre.org
Extended through July 26