| . | 01/19/2010
Lear
By: Wickham Boyle
Okwui Okpokwasili and April Matthis in LEAR
Photo Credit: Blaine Davis
When I saw Young Jean Lee’s absurdist take on Shakespeare’s King Lear, called merely Lear, I wished I were brighter. I wanted a vocabulary and life span, which parsed the Bard and Big Bird too. Lee’s play moves with the speed and intensity of a dreamscape, where players and visions intertwine to confuse and often enlighten.
This version of Lear gives us callow youth in the roles of Edgar, (Paul Lazar) and Edmund (Pete Simpson) we see them when the play opens and they have killed their father Gloucester. They are dancing with Lear’s daughters Regan (April Matthis) and her sister Goneril ( Okwui Okpokwasili). Cordelia (Amelia Workman) appears later sporting, we are told, sharp teeth. All of the actors own and play their roles masterfully.
The opening scene sets the tone to baffle and unseat the audience by rattling our memory cage from the Lear we all remember. And we are lulled into believing this might be a period piece, a mere reinvention of King Lear because of the opulent set by David Evans Morris and the flawless costumes by Roxana Ramseur all signal that we should prepare to watch Shakespeare as we know him. Even the early dance, choreographed so well by Dean Moss, brings us into a false world, one that will be shattered in minutes.
But this Lear, although distilled and with the ancient wizened father totally absent from the stage, is not toothless; rather it is vicious. The sisters talk about how Gloucester’s eyes were gouged out and they envision “rings of blood” and further when Regan questions her own actions her sister says "It's your style, there's no shame in that. Like Satan." For me it was akin to some of the reality television where the crimes against kith and kin are glossed over and all is entertainment at any cost. The plot continues with such violence all delivered in flat calm tones as if the cast were reading a grocery list of horror.
And it is a language of blatant torture and sexuality, which blasts ugliness unchecked. The onslaught is constant so that an audience member does not relax to a rhythm or story line, but rather has a feeling of being on-guard to terror and fear. This plot and language coupled with the music, which is accompanied by roaring vibrations much like the new police sirens that have invaded and jangled the NYC landscape, kept me on my seat’s edge and not always happily.
What I love about Shakespeare is that it follows as the day the night and the hapless audience, although challenged by language, is soothed by a familiar plot. This Lear leaves no place for calm. This Lear is a deconstruction of violence, loss and evil, punctuated by the arrival of Big Bird. There is even a moment of soliloquy when an actor, out of character, badgers the audience, “Is this really what you want to be doing with your life? Being here?” I was uncertain until the end when the whisperings of the full cast, now devoid of wigs and ruffs intones “I’ll miss you” until I was filled with not the former taunting teens torturing elders, or prisoner or classmates, but with the loss we all experience as we age out of the selfish years and into the time of looking back.
Director and writer Young Jean Lee has a lot of artistic capital amassed from last year’s look at race with The Shipment and she has an unflinching eye for dialogue and the connective tissue of a true absurdist. This is an ensemble to watch, where not a step or rhythm was random, from design to dance to delivery, but I needed more signs or road maps along the way to keep me on track and not just zoom in for the emotional finish.
Young Jean Lee’s Lear
The SOHO Rep
46 Walker Street
212 352 3101 through February 7 2010
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