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Berkshire Bard
Lear comes to Lenox
BY SALLY CRAGIN

For Shakespeare & Company artistic director Tina Packer, one of the pleasures of mounting a new production by the Bard is figuring out what the modern-day analogies might be. Her production of King Lear (which opens this Friday in Lenox) echoes issues in the Rupert Murdoch clan, the Bingham family of Kentucky, and even the Duvalliers of Haiti. Packer explains, " It’s about a family with huge power and wealth where the father wants to divide the kingdom before he’s dead to avoid strife, but by doing that he creates the strife. "

The S&C production puts added emphasis on Lear’s three daughters, Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia. " When the emphasis is toward the dynasty, the kids think they should have it all, " says Packer. Here Goneril has an overweening sense of entitlement, and Regan, the middle daughter, " looks like she’s the most sweet, but she’s the one who pulls Gloucester’s eyes out and is physically violent in a horrendous way that the others are not. "

As for Cordelia, the sincere youngest daughter who refuses to tell her father she loves him above all others, Lear " has a much lighter relationship with her. It’s a flirtatious relationship, and the fact that on the day she is to be betrothed, he wants her to say she loves him the best — she’s the only one who says, ‘There has to be a proportion about it.’  "

Playing Lear is Shakespeare & Company star Jonathan Epstein, who in his mid 40s is relatively young for the role. He says that Lear is one of the " three big mountains for the real tragedians. " (The other two, in the actor’s view, are Hamlet and Othello.) For Epstein, Lear is " obviously struggling with an intellectual question, but instead of using his mind, he’s using his emotions to think with. To have emotional shifts at that level is insanity, and what he does is pass through a kind of rage into a sublimely sane state which looks a lot like insanity. "

" I’m sure Johnny will play the role three or four times in his life, " says Packer. " You need a young man’s stamina to do the part. The most successful Lears I’ve seen — Paul Scofield and Ian Holm — have been younger. He’s got a very old soul when he does this. "

" I’m not limited by my experience of age yet, " says Epstein. " I hope to get another chance to do it every 10 years till I run out of gas. I’m very glad to be starting now, because I can feel how potent it is for me. With Lear, it’s, ‘How do I survive this breath — how do I survive the next?’ That’s really exciting. It makes me feel fully used — that there’s no part of me that isn’t called for. "

But both Epstein and Packer agree that no matter what your age, Lear is an exhausting role and one that requires constant shifts in mood, all building toward the storm scene when Lear wanders with his Fool and screams at the heavens, " Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! " When Lear is on the heath, says Epstein, " he moves to a simpler version of what it is to be human, the ‘poor, bare, forked animal.’ Kent says at the end that it’s a wonder that Lear endured so long. But he’s just too goddamned stubborn to die. "

And for the most part, too stubborn to cry. " Lear’s relationship to weeping is extremely complex, " Epstein continues. " Weeping is the enemy because it’s the representative of unmanliness. But he moves through that and says to Gloucester, ‘the first time that we smell the air,/We wawl and cry.’ But the point is we have to endure the crying. By the end, he has actually moved through to a kind of clarity. It’s not that he’s no longer in grief, it’s that the grief has become so transcendent that it’s about perceiving. "

King Lear is presented by Shakespeare & Company at its Founders’ Theatre in Lenox in repertory July 18 through August 30. Tickets are $10 to $45; call (413) 637-3353 or visit www.shakespeare.org.


Issue Date: July 18 - 24, 2003
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