Lear's Shadow (review)

With a trim running time of just over an hour, a single setting of a rehearsal room, and existing as a two-hander for much of its running time, Brian Elerding's independently made Lear's Shadow has an approach and aesthetic reminiscent of a television series bottle episode. And, much like the most impactful bottle episodes of recent memory—"Fly," the tenth episode of Breaking Bad's third season, immediately comes to mind—Elerding's approach is consummately effective in allowing him to delve deep into both the individual mindsets and the shared relationship of his two main characters: theater company director Jack (Fred Cross) and his lead actor Stephen (David Blue).

"You know," says Jack early on, "I've always wished that I could just do the main plot"—the plot in question being that of King Lear. Jack's musing comes soon after he and Stephen have finished running through dialogue from the first scene, and from that point, that's exactly what the two men do: piece together a "Lear-only Lear," as they describe it, by running through a handful of scenes from the play that particularly focus on the titular king. From a filmmaking perspective, the decision makes pragmatic sense: in a low-budget production such as this, with a relatively short running time and only two characters on screen for most of that, attempting to cover every plot element of Lear would likely have set the film up to disappoint, if not fail altogether.

Jack justifies his ambition by expressing a desire to gain greater understanding of Lear as a character, feeling that the play's subplot has in the past prevented him from doing that. Initially, therefore, having Jack and Stephen play out only Lear-centric scenes appears to give Elerding the opportunity to do what Jack feels he has never been able to do. In fact, Elerding does not "try to do Lear without the subplot" (as Jack puts it) at all. Instead, he introduces a tragic subplot of his own in place of Shakespeare's, delivered through modern-day scripted dialogue spoken by Jack, Stephen, and later Rachel (Katie Peabody), Jack's daughter. Importantly, the new subplot attempts neither to recreate the Gloucester story from the play nor to make the main Lear-centric plot contemporary. Elerding's script is better than that, subtly but powerfully resonating with themes from Lear. Facts and hints about the catastrophic events that have befallen these characters leading up to the hour or so we spend with them are interwoven with the director's chosen scenes from the play. In this way, Elerding's use of Lear is reminiscent of Kristian Levring's 2001 film The King Is Alive, in which a group of tourists stranded in the Namibian desert resort to rehearsing the play as a distraction from the desperate situation in which they find themselves. Elerding's appropriation of Lear shuns Levring's nihilistic and self-destructive perspective, however, instead utilizing the play to present an intimate exploration of the complex and fractured dynamic between colleagues, friends, and family still in the immediate throes of personal tragedy.

Adapted for the screen by Elerding from his Ensemble Shakespeare Theater Company play of the same name, Lear's Shadow retains the essence of theatrical performance without ever feeling simply like a filmed stage production. The play was first performed in 2017 with the audience seated at rehearsal tables surrounding the performance space, as if ready to take part in a table read (Dostal). Elerding's use of close-ups and mid-shots throughout his film, especially at times of heightened emotion, emulates the way in which the theater audience would have

Jack (Fred Cross) in Lear's Shadow, dir. Brian Eldering. Ensemble Shakespeare Theater, 2018. Production still courtesy of Brian Eldering.

been in close proximity to his characters when experiencing...