Not the Promis'd End

"I AM A MAN more sinned against than sinning."

Lear staggers across the heath, battered by wind and rain, invoking a far greater storm with his lips:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!

You cataracts and huricanoes, spout

Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!

You sulph'rous and throught-executing fires

Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts.

Singe my white head!

Will Lebow's Lear writhes in an imaginary straitjacket, frothing with rage, his voice audible even over the amplified thunder and wind of Boston Shakespeare's Horticultural Hall sound system.

From the wings enter two crimson-draped women, who commence a ritualistic dance in the darkness surrounding Lear. The audience, distracted from the old king's contortions, stares into the gloom and realizes that Regan and Goneril have joined their father on the heath.

Lear takes no notice of them even when they begin to paw him. Suddenly, we hear the women's voices, repeating lines from earlier scenes--but the words don't come from the stage; the actresses are silent. These disembodied voices blare over the same loudspeakers that have simulated the storm for ten minutes. In the din--enough to drive anyone mad--poor Lear's voice drops out, his volcanic speeches unheard, his personal apocalypse mastered by a 50-watt amplifier.

Bill Cain's King Lear creates ironies like that; the production staggers like blind Gloucester between a formal, tradition-ridden interpretation and a self-consciously innovative approach, until it topples over a Dover cliff of its own creation into farce. Too many serious lines receive laughs, or worse, snickers, from BSC's audience; the incongruities in Cain's direction must take the blame.

The opening scene, famous for its courtly formality, its symmetry, and its fairy-tale irrationality, looks completely straightforward until you notice the Fool wandering around in a squat, waving a wooden gyroscope over his head like some mystical wand. The standard swipes, grunts, and lunges of the Shakespearian sword-fight punctuate the duel between Edgar and Edmund, but the preceding battle between France's forces and the English army becomes a strange slow-motion dumbshow on Cain's stage.

Such apparent indecision on the director's part knocks the audience off balance. It doesn't help that Cain chooses the very middle of Act III--right before Lear enter's Poor Tom's hovel--for his intermission; the mounting horror in the theater suddenly dissipates when you buy your "Jamaica Cola" in the lobby, and it's difficult to take Lear's self-dramatizing declamation right after a desultory intermission conversation, or a trip to the rest rooms. Thus such atrocities as the general guffaw that followed Lear's "Didst thou give all to thy daughters?" last Thursday night.

Lebow rears his tall bulk up, out of the general confusion at ground level, and almost manages to clear away the smoke Cain's direction pours forth. This is a confident Lear, a rarity considering how many critics believe the role nearly unplayable. Lebow's accomplished command of the Shakespearean line never falters under the unreasonable demands of his role; try shouting "vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts" sometime, for example, and see how easy it is.

Lebow doesn't bother to find a profoundly all-inclusive theory for his role; he brings a versatile, booming voice, a carefully controlled set of mannerisms, and a simple human magnetism to the stage, and struggles to maintain them in the face of Cain's slings and arrows. His personal triumph stands far above the "general woe" of the rest of the production.

Most of the cast is competent but uninspired, and clearly a bit confused about how to interpret the play. Kirsten Giroux's Goneril is a shallow, cold bitch-queen; Janet Rodger's Regan a bit more of a bitchy housewife. Henry Woronicz's Edmund swaggers like a comic hero, an illegitimate Petruchio. Harold Levine's Cornwall is a snivelling rat of a villain, more disgusting than threatening.

Lear's entourage--Martha Jussaume's Cordelia, Tom Dinger's Fool, Richard McElvain's Kent--clearly got the word from Cain to "be loving," to be tender, to fit his interpretation of the play in the program notes. They hug each other a lot, hold each other's arms, "are supportive," as the psychologists say; they form pieta-like tableaux of familial affection. There's little wrong with that, and it might make a valid production of Lear someday, but all the actors--not just the nuclear family--would have to work towards realizing it, and the director would have to apply it with a consistent hand.

BSC's Lear leaves you with a lot of questions about the place of innovation on the Shakespearean stage. No one would argue for a theater of sterility, shunning all new ideas as "deviations from the author's intentions." But when you have a competent group of performers, and at least one actor of stature and brilliance who can use a play like Lear as a personal vehicle, it seems a cheat to squander the resources on half-baked ideas, directorial interpretations that aren't followed through, and "innovations" that clash with each other. Cain should either have moved in and molded a Lear to his liking, or sat back and let Lebow carry the evening.