King Lear

Reviewed by Steven Leigh Morris

Wallis Center for the Performing Arts

Through June 5

Shakespeare’s play gets a Wooster Group-ish makeover in John Gould Rubin’s modern dress staging for the Wallis. Tech is omnipresent, almost omniscient. Narrow, vertical panels on both sides of the stage provide screens for Keith Skretch’s projection design, featuring striking images of fires and floods now generally associated with climate change. Projections of Cordelia’s and Lear’s faces get beamed onto every seat in the theater, as though they, like us, and being part of us, are witnesses to Shakespeare’s diabolical study of the follies of old age, and treacheries within two families. Christopher Barreca’s scenic design features banquet tables and steel-framed chairs that, in the throes of Lear’s passion, get tossed onto their sides, leaving the stage strewn with foliage – another allusion to climate change.  The characters receive vital info via cell phone. Text messages are beamed onto those same two panels.

And yet, if this is a production seen through the lens of climate change and/or the usurping of our personal interactions by tech —  in order to understand our collapsing world – the result is a dizzying blur. Climate change and our fixation on social media are the direct consequences of executives in, respectively, the fossil fuel industry and tech corporations, who wilfully nurse their profits at the expense of environmental and social health. I’m unclear what that has to do with the plot of King Lear – and with this rendition of it. Yes, there are terrible storms in Shakespeare’s play — physical, metaphysical and emotional storms. Yet what good play written by anybody, at any time, doesn’t include storms? Does that mean that every play, new and old, is now a reflection on climate change? And yet, those images of fires and floods keep cycling through this production, as though there’s a meaningful connection?

I found this a bit frustrating, to put it mildly, given how so many of the themes in King Lear – a tragedy about the end of the world — resonate so directly with the staggering threat to Western democracies across the globe. This is a play where lies and allegations are contrived against good people with grounded ethical convictions, where the charge of treason flies out from all camps, as it has in our nation since 2020. The character of Edmund – fueled by grievance over his very identity — would, in 2022, be a member-in-good standing of The Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers. The very plot of King Lear centers on a political insurrection, and on two families who begin eating each other alive, after their patriarchs (Lear and Gloucester) make tragic, foolish, rash miscalculations about who is loyal to them, and who is not. A family turning on itself is as much a story of this nation, as it is of France, the UK, and so many countries in Eastern Europe. Not that any reinterpretation of a classic need be thuddingly literal, but honestly — does that mean it should be as opaque as on this stage?  

Enough on that. Seven actors perform the entire play – or what’s left of it after all the husbands, and Kent, and more, have been removed. This choice enables focus on Lear (Joe Morton) and his three daughters (River Gallo, Emily Swallow and Brie Eley), juxtaposed against Gloucester (Mark Harelik) and his two sons (Rafael Jordan and Zachary Solomon). Not to mention the financial windfall of using only seven actors to perform a play with over 26 characters.

There are a couple of costs to this decision: Aside from hopscotching through the plot, working around so many characters who appear to have called in sick, there exists a lethal jealousy between Lear’s horrible daughters, Regan and Goneril, both lusting after Gloucester’s “illegitimate” and villainous son, Edmund. In the absence of the women’s spouses, who simply don’t exist in this production, the daughters’ infidelity gets removed from the equation (along with their husbands, Albany and Cornwall). And so, perhaps in the interest of efficiency, another layer of betrayal has been plucked out.  Finally, near the end of Shakespeare’s play, amidst a field of corpses, the moderate Duke of Albany – heading a kind of January 6 inquiry – leads an investigation to determine the depths of Edmund’s treason. At the Wallis, there is no Albany. In Shakespeare, the moderate center, represented by Albany, prevails over the extremists, though admittedly at a terrible cost. This is among Shakespeare’s most salient points amidst the fevered destruction and self-destruction – a point here rendered AWOL.

Morton brings a pleasing physical and emotional jocularity to Lear. Harelik’s Gloucester is another highlight of artistry and skill. I also enjoyed Swallow’s tempered and feline Goneril. River Gallo portrays both Cordelia and the Fool in the same white dress, white pumps, and with the same intonation, which becomes challenging to remedial comprehension. Solomon brings fire and fury to Edgar, though swaths of his dialogue are unintelligible – inexcusable in a high tech production with all of the actors donning microphones.

A singular revelation: When near the production’s close, director Rubin strategically shuts down the projections and Danny Erdberg and Ursala Kwong-Brown’s thundering, rumbling and at times delicate music composition/sound design. The actors are left sans tech to recite the lines from this epic poem, to bring it home, and it starts to feel eerily beautiful. World without tech. Perhaps that’s a key to bringing Shakespeare into our century.

The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills; Tues.-Fri., 7;30 pm, Sat., 2 & 7:30 pm, Sun., 2 & 7:20 pm; thru June 5. Running time: three hours and 15 minutes with one intermission. https://thewallis.org/lear