King Lear
Reviewed by Stephen Fife
Source Material
Closed
I’ve been going to see theater since I can remember. Growing up in New York City, it was just something I always did. And now, whenever I see a show, it brings back memories of others I’ve seen — and the better the experience, the more intense and wide-ranging those memories are. So when I say that seeing Source Material’s King Lear at the Bootleg Theatre evoked neither a single recollection nor one interesting thought, you will understand how disappointing a theatrical event I found it to be.
King Lear is a play I know well. I’ve been to more productions than I can keep track of — perhaps more than 20, including 4 or 5 here in L.A. Thus, it was clear from a glance at the program that this was going to be a highly adapted and truncated version. For one thing, while it’s hard to do Lear with fewer than 15 actors, no matter how much double and triple-casting is used, here only 5 actors were listed for 8 roles total. Also, the program stated that this King Lear was “by William Shakespeare. Additional text by Samantha Shay, Bob Wicks and Sophie Natanel.” I guess that’s one way to get your name alongside the immortal Bard’s.
The show begins with four young women onstage in various stages of undress (bodice, underwear, skirts, tank tops, bare feet), with a plastic cyclorama behind them. A performer with long curly red hair (Annemarie de Bruijn) stands at the front, shaking her head apprehensively, as if warning the audience that she wants no part in what is about to happen. Two other performers (Ditte Berkeley and Nini Julia Bang) then wind a sheer gold scarf around the face of the fourth woman (Annelise Lawson). This fourth woman unwinds the scarf, then stands up and starts complaining about how they had “fucked up” the opening — it was “a real shit show.” I couldn’t have agreed with her more, and I half-expected them to start over again, but they didn’t.
What is the show about? As the joke goes, it is about an hour. Words are spoken, some of them Shakespeare’s, but there is no attempt to stitch together a narrative, at least none that I could decipher. (That is probably the point, but it’s not enough to make me glad I spent an hour in L.A. traffic to get there.) At a certain point a male actor (Bob Wicks) enters, also in underwear. The women then dress him, which is kind of interesting in a Samuel Beckett way, but then he opens his mouth and speaks dreary lines and everyone goes back to sleep.
Ditte Berkeley is listed as playing “Mother,” a role that doesn’t appear in Shakespeare’s play. This could have been interesting, I guess, except I could not figure out why she was there, much less why she kept changing her clothes. The best actor is Annelise Lawson, who attended the Yale School of Drama and was the only performer who listed a number of credits. Ms. Lawson plays both Cordelia (Lear’s youngest daughter) and Gloucester’s bastard son Edmund, though she also utters some of Lear’s lines. After reciting Edmund’s glorious speech about being a bastard, she follows with: “Good girls don’t usually have a chance to play villains” — which was definitely not written by William S.
There’s a lot of recorded music in the production, composed by Paul Evans and Iceland’s JFDR, which was frankly more interesting than anything onstage. With so little of the Shakespeare’s play here, why call it King Lear? Why not Samantha’s Lear? Or Lear Without Shakespeare? Or Samantha Kills Lear?
Source Material will be performing at the International Arts Festival in San Francisco in May. Information about tickets can be found on www.sourcematerialcollective.com.
Bootleg Theater, 2220 Beverly Blvd., Filipinotown; Closed. https://www.bootlegtheater.org/. Running time: about one hour with no intermission.
