Photo credit: David Kinder.
About a decade ago, when my aged mother was at the last of her life after a prolonged fight with colon cancer, I was down in Southern California spending her last week with her with my family at my sister?s house, at my mother?s bedside. On the final day, when it was very apparent she didn?t have much longer, and fighting for every last breath, the rest of the family went about their business in the house, including young nieces and nephews running and yelling as children do. I asked one of the mothers if they?d ask their kid to lower his voice a bit and calm down, as grandma appeared close to the end, to give her some peace. My eldest sister came in the room, planted her feet, stood across from me sitting on the other side of my mother?s death bed, and proceeded to try and pick a fight with me over what I had just requested. I just sat there, looking from her to my mother?s body clinging to the last moments of life and just shook my head. ?Whatever,? I said quietly as she repeated her rant at me. I looked back at my mother. ?I don?t want to argue with you.?
My mother died later that night, her family gathered around the bed.
Months later, I received a very apologetic e-mail from my eldest sister regarding that night, saying how sorry she was she chose that moment to fly off the handle at me and realized I was just trying to make things calm for mom and her passing, and asked my forgiveness.
Of course, I forgave her and told her I understood. As we should forgive any family member who rages, goes into hysterics, behaves wildly inappropriately, cries beyond the bounds of grief, laughs crazily, or sits frozen and immobile; for in the passing of a grand matriarch or patriarch of any clan, especially one that may have often been ?difficult? at best, people around them lose all sense of identity. The question of, ?Who am I if they are no longer in my life?? remains unanswered and nagging, and that combined with grief in a passing can drive people, well, simply batty. How could I not forgive my sister for losing her sense of self and propriety in a moment when we all were coming to terms with our grief? Throw into that mix the questions of money, power, property and family politics and you have yourself a potent recipe for a lot of toxic crazy sauce.
This is nothing new and thus has it ever been. Shakespeare, also, touched on just how twisted and out of whack family members can become around aging, madness and death of a central figure, especially families wielding power and determining the future of the feudal masses in many of his plays. But nowhere does this hit home more in the subject of parents and daughters and sons than in King Lear.
Director Jon Kretzu, whose work at Artists? Repertory Theatre we have enjoyed in the past, recognizes the rich material available here around aging, family power dynamics and death, especially here in Oregon, a ?right to die? state, and also in recent context of the Supreme Court?s upholding of the majority of the Affordable Care Act provisions. Together with a stellar ensemble cast, they give us a darkly rich, dynamic, modern and personal King Lear for the Portland Shakespeare Project.
There are several quirks of this production that might leave the audience wondering if these many hat tricks will be pulled off Kretzu and his cast ? a cast of six playing multiple roles, the woman playing daughter Regan also playing the complex Edmund the Bastard role, Cordelia also playing the Fool, the modern setting in a patient room of a skilled nursing care facility, etc. The good news is: not only are these many devices done well, they succeed in being far more than tricks, they actually amplify and enhance the play, making for a highly intimate Lear. This does not mean ?pleasant,? as the material has always been about how warped family relationships and power plays can get ? but this setting truly touches those scary and uncomfortable places we?ve all been to, perhaps as recently as the last thanksgiving or christmas trip home.
From the opening, Kretzu and his cast show us we?re not in for a stock summer repertory Lear: the very beginning, with traditionally conniving daughters, Regan (Dana Millican, who also shows great range as Edgar) and Goneril (Allison Tigard) are upper class debutantes, arranging a kitschy birthday party in their father?s nursing home room, while sitting in waiting room chairs, smilingly paging through People magazines and distractedly checking their iPhones. We are given three repeated versions of of their declarations of love and fealty to their father Lear (Tim Blough), and Cordelia?s (Dainichia Noreault) observations of these over-the-top professions, and how little she can compete with such lofty declarations. The first, probably closest to the truth, is Lear in enfeebled condition and the daughters too giggly and distracted to remember the lines they know their father wishes them to quote to show love; the second, probably Lear?s inner vision of how he wishes to be perceived, far more the traditional powerful patriarch, albeit from a wheelchair, and the daughters really pouring it on; the final, somewhere in the ?tween, with a far more conversational, eavesdropping on a family gathering, with just a hint of the oily family politics beneath.
This sets the motif for the question raised throughout this production: what is real, here, what is appeasement to a confused old man, and what is the continued twisted fantasy within a dying man?s mind? And even in the most fantastical moments, still the grain of truth: the phantasms and alternate roles Lear?s dream state would have him imagine his family in reflect the cause and effect of previous family roles and arguments that might have played out before and now dance and interchange in his fevered mind. Millican?s excellent turn in the dual role as the conniving and lustful for power Edmund, perhaps one of the most treacherous roles in the canon besides Iago, may simply be a reflection of the paranoia Lear detects of his daughters plotting against him. Noreault?s turn as the Fool after Cordelia?s banishment makes sense in this dream reality also ? acting as the true loyalty and conscious in a different personage that Cordelia always was to him. As anyone who has ever stood watch at the bedside of a fading relative and watched altzheimer?s, dementia, or just the morphine to ameliorate the pain, take what was once ?them? and have it slip away, bit by bit, along with accompanying paranoia, Lear?s demand of ego-stroking declarations from family and his need to control even in retirement is an all too familiar, holding on to the last vestiges of diminishing identity. These visions in fugue states strike close in the familiar, and mark the depths that Kretzu?s production explores.
The deftness of this production is shown in how it subverts expectations in character and vision while still remaining very true to the original text: Tigard & Millican?s daughters protestations against Lear?s retinue and bouncing him back and forth between them seem less like the traditional conniving for more power, and more the true wounds experienced by grown children trying cater to an increasing unreasonable and paranoid parent in their end days, while still trying to stand up for themselves. The alternative story between perfunctory friend & aid Gloucester (Grant Byington), Edgar (Matthew Kerrigan) and Edmund perhaps only happens in Lear?s mind, but reflects the true twisted undercurrent of relationship he has with his children. I found Kerrigan smirkingly interesting at first as a young, nondescript, hipster favored son, certainly how the vision of Edmund would identify and be annoyed by him. Later I worried Edgar?s madness in flight and interacting with Lear and the Fool might have been a bit much scenery chewing, save it is indeed as far as mad vision and voice in befuddled Lear?s head can go.
The many distorted visions seen in Lear?s slow disintegration are powerful, arresting and fresh, but always taking their cue from the original material: Millican?s Edmund/Regan lust for both Tigard?s Goneril and the opportunity she offers is a power-play seduction, with both expected titillation and creepiness. The panicked, vengeful capture and blinding of Gloucester by them (reflection of the panic Lear feels at their hands?) becomes an unsettling and gory dance straight out of Tarantino?s Reservoir Dogs, the blinding being done by the debutante?s stiletto heel, choreographed to k.d. lang?s sappho version of Crying. Within this more personal Lear as the rabbit hole of madness at the end of life, the Machiavellian politics from paranoia are not lost either.
Blough as Lear is masterful: gifted with one of those silky, bass voices of American Theatre, he knows well not to merely rely on that tone and with mastery goes in and out of the various personalities in the maze of madness Kretzu has set up within the text; powerful and masterful when required, lost and whimpering when his insanity has cast him adrift. The famed, ?Blow winds?? rage against a lightning storm could well be a hospital defibrillator?s electric paddles attempting to revive him one last time, and his desperate fight to grasp onto what it is ripping away from him. All the more sense it makes in the aftermath, that in this far more vulnerable state, he reunites with his truly loyal Cordelia. The demon phantasms of his mind flying away, with the deaths and routing of the other daughters and Edmund.
The final moments are as beautiful and poetic a tableau on stage as I have seen, raising the question ? who is truly passing here? The text says it is the tragedy of losing Cordelia, even as Lear realizes his wrong and reunites with her; but, just as real in his ever loosening grip on life, reality and his own identity, Cordelia gently lays her cloak in his arms as he declares, even before her there, that she is dead, allowing her father this last illusion as the doctor prepares the death cocktail syringe. Kretzu and his cast are in the top of their form as they leave us with so many intoxicating visions of the loss of relationships and individual identity long before a body?s final breath. For all who have experienced such at the bedside of the dying, this Lear is rich with the difficult emotional depths they are often been dragged through. That any production can leave an audience with such arresting visions, seeing the text anew while remaining quite true to it, is the ultimate achievement.
Portland Shakespeare Project presents King Lear at the Artists? Repertory Theatre. Directed by Jon Kretzu. Featuring Tim Blough, Grant Byington, Matthew Kerrigan, Dana Millican, Dainichia Noreault and Allison Tigard. Scenic Design by Rusty Tennant, Costume by Jessica Bobillot, Lighting Design by Kristeen Willis Crosser, Sound Design by Zachary Horvath, Prop Design by Marlowe Dobbe; Stage Manager: Tyler Ryan. Runs July 18th through August 4th at the Artists? Repertory Theatre Morrison Stage, 1515 S.E. Morrison Street, Portland, Oregon 97205, (503) 241-1278, boxoffice@artistsrep.org. Runs July 18th through August 4th. Ticket Prices: Adults ? $30, Portland Shakespeare Project Season Subscription Package: Adults ? $25, Student Tickets ? $18 (all shows). Tickets available through Ticket Turtle Web Site, or the Portland Shakespeare Project, 4770 Avery Lane, Lake Oswego, OR, 97035. For ticket inquiries please contact our box office at (503) 313-3048.
Source: http://portlandstagereviews.com/2012/07/25/review-king-lear-psp/
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