Shakespeare in the Park’s King Lear
(L-R): John Lithgow, Glenn Fleshler, Jessica Hecht, Clarke Peters, Slate Holmgren and Jessica Collins in King Lear.
One
of King Lear’s many unpleasant metaphors used to describe his traitorous
daughters comes midway through the play, when he and his company have been
turned out of the house of his second child, Regan, and into a raging
thunderstorm. Insisting with acrimony
that the travails of one befouled beggar must needs have originated with the
man’s daughters, Lear pontificates, “Nothing
could have subdued nature / To such a lowness but his unkind daughters… ‘Twas…
those pelican daughters,” referring to the popular legend in
the sixteenth century that infant pelicans fed on their parents’ blood. In Daniel Sullivan’s production of King Lear at the Delacorte Theatre (it
hasn’t been seen there since 1973), running through August 17th,
this venomous aside appears to be more than relevant. King Lear himself, played with a surfeit of
talent by John Lithgow, fills the play up with blood, and the actresses
portraying his daughters drain it back out again.
Jessica Hecht, as Regan, Jessica
Collins, as Cordelia, and, shockingly, Annette Bening as Goneril are so flat
and listless that they render the A-story of Shakespeare’s celebrated tale of
senility rather boring and, occasionally, seemingly endlessly long. Not only are Ms. Hecht and Ms. Bening
noticeably old for their roles (56-year-old Bening and 49-year-old Hecht play
the marriageable daughters of the 68-year-old Lithgow) and Ms. Collins
ill-suited to the role of Cordelia (managing to conjure only the mystery of the
character, and none of what lies beneath), but all three extract much of the
drama from this tale of royal espionage and murder. Goneril and Regan’s partner in crime, Eric
Sheffer Stevens as Edmund, bastard son of Gloucester
This unfortunate turn of events
certainly allows the audience to appreciate what excellent performances we’re
given. The Earl of Gloucester, a Lear
loyalist, is embodied entirely by the magnificent Clarke Peters, and his
legitimate son, Edward, is well-portrayed by Chukwudi Iwuji, who is barred from
equal greatness only by his perennially resurfacing—and slightly
distracting—Nigerian accent. Steven
Boyer gives Lear’s Fool a slightly childlike, petulant air that adds
significantly to understanding of his frustration. And, of course, we are lucky to witness the
explosive performance of John Lithgow as the old King himself.
At the beginning of Lear, the King is trustingly—and, as we
later find, stupidly—entrusting his lands to his three daughters in a state of
ecstasy. In the middle, he is to be
found railing against the elements and going rapidly mad. In the end, his spirit is broken entirely by
the death of the daughter he judged too harshly.
Mr. Lithgow portrays this range of emotion with pitch-perfect attention
to detail. He is slightly young for the
role (Lear is, in the play, meant to be eighty), but his hunching posture,
slow, deliberate movements, and white beard contribute well to the
illusion. Under even Mr. Sullivan’s rather uninspired direction (the Druidic, imperial theme has been done to death,
even in June's Macbeth at the
Park Avenue Armory), Mr. Lithgow manages to shine. While not exactly a tour-de-force (the flaws
in the performance can be interpreted either as humanizing or oversights), it
is certainly a turn that will be remembered beyond this summer, even if, thanks
to the lukewarm results this time, Lear is not performed again at the Delacorte
for another forty years.
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