Review: KING LEAR by The Baron's Men, Austin
by Michael Meigs
Shakespeare's great tragedy is a fable that dares portray in resounding verse some of mankind's most common but most harrowing issues. The tyranny of the selfish old, set against the arrogance of the selfish young; the toxic dissolution of family ties and family hierarchy; the horror of ageing and senescence; the inevitability of human downfall; ambition, evil, and the sacrifice of innocents.
These huge and inescapable issues are rooted in the human condition. We huddle together in our families and societies to keep our human warmth. When these fail us, we become prey to merciless nature and to madness. Shakespeare is dealing in absolutes, great flaws and great consequences, as in all of the most enduring tragedies of Western literature.
-- AustinLiveTheatre review of Lear at The Vortex, 2011
Lear, the character, towers over almost all of the literary canon as we speakers of European languages know it. Equals to Lear in eccentricity, misguided pride, and tragic significance might be Oedipus, don Quijote, and Faust. In comparison, Hamlet, as complex and emblematic of the human condition as he is, would sit lightly on the old king's knee, companion to Cordelia, the youngest princess.
No surprise, then, that few are those actors and companies that attempt to scale this Everest. In 2006 I saw Stacey Keach rage through the role at Chicago's Goodman Theatre in a heart-stopping production set in war-torn Yugoslavia. In 2011 Rudy Ramirez made the audacious but entirely laudable choice to enlist the august Jennifer Underwood as Lear in his reset of the story as a contemporary media-obsessed nightmare. And in 2015 Austin, in a feat of impressive thespian archeology, Beth Burns and her Hidden Room company produced Nahum Tate's English Restoration rewrite of Lear with Ryan Crowder as a slim, frantic Lear, faithful to Tate's imaginings.
The Baron's Men have assumed the challenge of King Lear for their twenty-fifth season of Shakespeare without resetting, reforming, or significantly altering Shakespeare's text. The company deserves respect and great celebration for its continuing devotion to Elizabethan-era style, movement, scansion, and costuming at the impressive outdoor quarter-scale playhouse in the woods just beyond the Pennybacker Bridge on 360.
Their King Lear proves that Shakespeare's verse is sufficient in itself to fulfill Aristotle's requisites for tragedy: pity and fear portrayed in an action of mimesis that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude.
In creating his character of Lear, Andy Bond relies above all on his eloquently fluid delivery of the old king's lines. He doesn't have Keach's menacing physicality, Underwood's imposing authority, or Crowder's unpredictability. As I witnessed the unfolding of the tragedy, I became aware with increasing disquiet that Bond's Lear, of modest stature, contained, cerebral, and sensitive to slight, was physically like myself. I don't have the uncertain marionette's gait that Bond uses to suggest Lear's age, but seeing the king's increasing confusion and inability reminded me all too acutely of the mortality that we all share.
Shakespeare's verse emerged with striking clarity in the lines pronounced by virtually everyone onstage. Daughters Goneril (Jacquelyn Lies) and Regan (Stephanie Crugnola) matched one another not only in presence and articulation but also in focused self-interest.
Similarly well spoken, well imagined, and well crafted was Robert Deike's Earl of Kent. Kent is the truth teller, shunned by his king for that virtue. Deike, ever emphatic, was born for that role. Todd Jeffrey, new to me, was wily and impressively crisp of delivery as Gloucester's illegitimate son Edmund, scheming to inherit while seducing both Goneril and Regan. Mac Gibson as Lear's fool provided a full and entertaining characterization , but he often didn't adequately project his voice.
The company altered the playing area slightly by adding a wide platform off stage right, used for Kent's imprisonment in the stocks and for blinded Gloucester's suicide attempt at the cliffs of Dover. Costumes, as ever with this company, are gorgeously designed and sewn—founding member Dawn Allee-Hemphill headed a team of twelve stitchers. Particularly striking was the costume for wicked Edmund, a tight-fitting suit of midnight back with slashes that revealed a lining or inner garment in assorted gleaming colors.
Director Lindsay Palinsky is expert in the use of the Elizabethan space and maintains a good pace throughout. She gives her all; not only is she listed on the four-member construction team, but she was costumed, smiling, and busy helping people to their assigned seats and solving audience problems.
You're not likely to see this King Lear matched anytime soon. Go; watch the Baron's Men climb this Everest.
The Final Scene: Cordelia's Death, Two Views
EXTRA
Click to view the Baron's Men program for King Lear
King Lear
by William Shakespeare
The Baron's Men
October 4 - 26, 2024
Curtain Theatre, Austin
