Utah Shakespeare Festival: “King Lear”

I am at the Utah Shakespeare Festival this week, both for an academic conference and to take in the last season at the Adams Shakespearean Theatre. Construction of a new outdoor playhouse is ongoing across the street to which the dimmers of the Adams will be transferred at the end of the summer. As part of the festival’s agenda to “complete the canon” by staging all of Shakespeare’s works before mounting any restagings, this season features The Taming of the Shrew, King Lear, and 2 Henry IV.

Last night I took in the second of these, King Lear, which happens to be the flagship production of the season featuring television actor Tony Amendola. What is striking about this production are its attempt to naturalize Lear’s madness while at the same time interiorizing his daughters’ rejection as unnatural. The opening moments off the play were perhaps the most thoughtful: the ornate bannister of the balcony was replaced with something far more rough-hewn, and barren trees extend from the exposed discovery space up into the balcony. A rock formation is the only addition to this otherwise “bare” stage. The three sisters gradually enter, one by one, the stage and pace its edges silently while the audience shuffles and files into their seats, wringing their hands with looks of furrowed concentration. We are asked to connect the blasted heath of the set with the blasted emotions of Lear’s daughters from the outset.

Set design (Vicki M. Smith) with the Fool (David Pichette) entering above.

The barrenness of the stage design is a smart contrast to the sumptuous and italiante design of the night before with The Taming of the Shrew: Lear’s curse that Goneril be barren is underscored, and I must admit somewhere problematicall since her husband was the only actor of color on stage. It was unclear if the moment of miscenganous anxiety was intentional, coincidence, or the whitewashed cultural makeup or rural Utah coming unexpectantly to bear. Playing Goneril is the same same actress playing Kate the night beofer: it would seem Melinda Pfundstein is specializing in older sisters with a bad wrap this season. While the personas were clearly demarcated between productions, I wonder what kind, if any, bleed over their might have been for her in the rehearsal process? (The repertory company at USF tkae about seven weeks to build each show, usually in overlapping time frames.) She and Regan, played by Saren Nofs-Snyder, were well distinguished from one another, the later the more simpering and reactive in opposition to the former’s domineering approach to family politics.

Cordelia (Kelly Rogers) attempts to make decisions from France.

But one cannot write about Lear without addressing the technologies of madness: the storm and the blinding. Both moments of chaos and unreason, her the director, Sharon Ott, decided to go with a mechanized storm rather than one of the mind. Thunder effects (no lightening flashes however) and fog machines enveloped Amendola as he wrestled withhis environs. The delivery of the famous speech, “Blow winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage!” was aimed outward at the audience and the calm western night sky rather than inward as a show of Lear wrestling with his own inner demons. I make much of this because it seemed at odds with the rest of his performance where outbursts were followed by gestures, galnces, and other body language that implied Lear’s shock at his own behavior. James Newcomb’s Gloucester had perhaps a more satisfying arc in this case because you can see his cocky self-assurance, bragging at his own sexual prowess with his bastard son as evidence, dissolve at the unexpeted civil war within his own house, and then his blinding. Gloucester embraces (what he thinks are) the clifts of Dover, giving over to is natural environs as a means to explore his limitations as a father in which Lear could as well: it simply depends on the appraoch to his storm. A storm of the mind, while far more difficult to execute, may have aligned the narratives of Gloucester and lear far more coherently.

Edgar (Tyler Pierce) pretends to take his blinded father (James Newcomb) to the precipice of Dover.

There is no doubt that this was a visually stirring production, whose design was visually sympathetic to the outdoor Adams Shakespearean Theatre as well as the themes in the play itself. Rather than putting the interior anxieitites, the “madenesses,” of Gloucester, Lear, and their children on a continuum of inner dysfunction, the production cose to instead exteriorze the suffering of the fathers, making them something natural and sympathetic, while interiorizing and obfuscating the suffering of the children. By obfuscating those motives, children can only be seen as villains in this play—that, or impossible sacrificial lambs free from the trauma of living with power your whole life. (In this way Cordelia always seems an alien to me.) Certainly Lear is a crucial play today as we struggle with finding was of ethically supporting aging parents with dementia, mental and physical illnesses, while not stripping them of their dignitity and independence. Productions that interlink the generations in Lear rather than hermetically seal them off from on another (doing a kind of lip service to the commonplace that youth cannot comprehend what it means to age) in the way that Ott does so her with Gloucester and his sons are sorely needed–a compelling reason indeed to see this production in the festival’s last few weeks.

  • The Utah Shakespeare Festival‘s production of King Lear plays at the Adams Shakespeare Theatre 27 June to 4 September 2015.
  • A gallery of photos of the conference, play, and festival space is available here.
  • Check out the production preview below:

Utah Shakespeare Festival: “The Taming of the Shrew”

What masking stuff is this?

I am at the Utah Shakespeare Festival this week, both for an academic conference and to take in the last season at the Adams Shakespearean Theatre. Construction of a new outdoor playhouse is ongoing across the street to which the dimmers of the Adams will be transferred at the end of the summer. As part of the festival’s agenda to “complete the canon” by staging all of Shakespeare’s works before mounting any restagings, this season features The Taming of the Shrew, King Lear, and 2 Henry IV.

USF’s new commedia dell’arte Greenshow on Thursdays.

While the production of Shrew is sumptuous and thoughtful, featuring smart and funny performances all across the ensemble, it is a play I must admit makes me uncomfortable in general. Namely this is because of its tacit approval of violence—to spouses as much as the lower classes. As is the norm in staging this play, the Christopher Sly hunting induction has been cut, and so the onus of the production lies on the presumption that Kate needs and will be reformed. This is despite the fact that we only know she needs reform based on rumors and reports from men interested in her younger sister. That Melinda Pfundstein plays a snarky Kate with a smile suggests that she is surrounded by a great deal of false report. And while certainly Kate isn’t innocent—she chases her sister, and ties her up at one point—it is hard to believe she deserves Petruchio’s “taming” program.

Brian Vaughn’s Burtonesque debonair (not to mention that Pfundstein could easily pass as Elizabeth Taylor) as Petrucio seems to excuse him from a great deal of abuse. We meet him beating his manservant soundly, not only punching him in the face, but kicking him in the nethers, and then slamming into a wall several times. He then takes out a bullwhip of all things to demonstrate his marshal prowess. Similarly in the “meet cute” between Petruchio and Kate there is much struggling, holding, and force applied, as indicated by the text. A clever choice by the production was to juxtapose their private behavior with public behavior. At one point when Petruchio threatens to marry Kate by force (with the embedded threat of rape) and has her roughly held, her fathe can be seen opening and looking out a casement from above. Petruchio’s rhetoric immediately depreciates. There is a moment when Kate and Petruchio sit side by side on the stage discussing the merits of “mother wit,” the thing that makes them attracted to one another, before Petruchio again flips, getting on top of Kate and pinning her down physically and verbally. This is not reserved to Petruchio and Kate, however. Bianca’s behavior alone with her sister and in front of their father is drastically different: she goes from a cloying trickster to a bawling babe the moment he appears. Perhaps it is this deceitful behavior by Bianca that the men most fear but map onto Kate.

The intermission set of USF’s “The Taming of the Shrew.”

Because of the physical violence embedded in the text of the play, it is a difficult one to recover. And yet the sparring of Kate and Petruchio, like Beatrice and Benedict, drives us to desire their union. To resolve this, Vaughn, also an artistic director at the festival, builds in moments that code as “true love” to us: his inabiity to speak when he first sees Kate, suggesting love at first sight, and a number of long pauses and looks of intensity that suggest the two see an inner match to the other. These performance choices work to underscore passages like: “thart all is done in reverant care of her…this is the way to kill a wife with kindness.” Violence and love are problematically rolled and collapsed together. The final betting scene is played as a kind of defense of Kate by Petruchio, when the men tease him for marrying the most shrewish women their is—the shrew. His reply, “I say no,” and proposes a wager that works in tis production to defend her public opinion (and by extension, his), rewriting the gossips narrative by force that she is not a shrew of any kind.

In its sumptuous Italianate decor and expert performances, the production works very hard to recover and venerate the passionate mating of Petruchio and Kate. It almost works, it had me up until her final speech. In the moment that Kate tosses her new cap to the floor upon request and sets out her speech that she is but a wek, feeble, and soft woman whose resistance toher husband poorly repays his manly protection of her, I am lost. This may be a problem of periods: this gesture is as incommensurate to 21st-century feminisms as Ray Rice’s punching of his then fiance now wife Janay in an elevator when he thought no one was looking, and then making her appologize for it at a press conference. This may be a problem of cultures: as a modern American woman, my cultural milieu celebrates the strong, independent, individualized female (to a point, at least). It makes me wonder: Is there a place for Shrew in contemporary theatre culture when it seems impossible to save the play from its own agenda of violent censure of women by men.

  • The Utah Shakespeare Festival‘s production of The Taming of the Shrew plays at the Adams Shakespeare Theatre 25 June to 5 September 2015.
  • A gallery of photos of the conference, play, and festival space is available here.
  • Check out the production preview below: