King Lear (review)

With a strong cast and insightful direction from Tom Prewitt, Avant Bard’s King Learextended compassionate attention to the suffering of even minor characters. To Rick Foucheux’s credit, the lead never allowed his moving Lear to monopolize scenes. Even as the king grew increasingly detached from reality, Foucheux remained connected to his scene partners. This generosity in performance opened up space for Prewitt’s production to develop the play’s exploration of shared vulnerability and the abuse of power.

The set—an empty ring, surrounded by a low wall, with a round, stone dais in the center, (sometimes scrawled with dirt and chalk), and blasted pieces of geodome suspended in the air—recalled the round, medieval stone hall of Peter Brook’s King Lear, after a modern apocalypse. The company inhabited the set to strong effect throughout. A watchful Edmund (Dylan Morrison Myers), lean and sharp in a leather jacket, habitually hovered at the periphery eyeing the action, throwing knowing glances like darts at individual audience members, who were seated around two-thirds of the playing space. When a newly-blinded Gloucester (Cam Magee) beckoned and approached “Poor Tom” from outside the stone wall, the simple danger of her tripping and falling focalized the audience’s care for her, and sense of the precariousness of her life. Magee is a highly skilled classical actress whose direct delivery of verse moved the action of the play forward, and crystallized its emotional stakes. There was a palpable kindness in her voice when she asked Poor Tom for help.

Changing Gloucester’s gender played on expectations of femininity to strong effect. Spoken by a woman, Magee’s unabashed declaration of her son’s bastardy felt more humiliating. The shift between her demonstrations of maternal affection and the coldness of her abrupt disinheritance of Edgar was alienating for both Edmund and the audience. Directing the violence toward an older woman’s body intensified the cruelty of her blinding. Left alone during the battle, Magee tottered helplessly around the stage, terrified with nowhere to hide, in the attack of abstract, flashing lights and chaotic sounds. As was often the case in Avant Bard’s production, this startling effect of vulnerability was achieved by leaning into the Brechtian elements inherent in the script; in this case, by keeping to the spirit of the stage directions that place blind Gloucester, hiding in the hollow of a tree listening to offstage fighting, at the heart of the scene, often in modern productions exchanged for more conventional, verisimilar combat.

Foucheux made Lear both cruel and gentle. The three scenes of disinheritance had similar blocking and rhythm, all ending with the daughter low to the ground for the final berating, followed by a pause in which each actress quietly absorbed the pain inflicted. This pattern clarified the alliance between an efficient Goneril (Alyssa Sanders) and an unnervingly persuasive and sweet Regan (Charlene V. Smith) as a response to shared abuse. Foucheux made his Lear vulnerable through total immersion in his delusions. In the trial scene, he seemed most unstrung and helpless when he followed with his eyes and feet an invisible mouse scuttling the circumference of the ring. An actor of considerable vocal power, Foucheux did not so much attempt to create the storm with his voice, but rather allowed the imagined storm—the water pouring on his open face and mouth—to affect the quality of his speech, so that it felt like a dialogue with the wind and the rain. Lear’s appearance in Dover was...