I thoroughly enjoyed watching the recent performance of King Lear at DTC. I feel like most people weren’t as crazy about the production, but there is a special place in my heart for Shakespeare and DTC always manages to blow my mind. I understood the levels of the play much more once I saw it on the stage. No play is perfect, though, and many things could have been fixed.
Let’s start with Lear. He is the title character and I thought he was the weakest of all of the actors. I saw the production twice, once with the school, and once on the last production night with my mom and my point of view totally changed. Lear’s voice bothered me. It was weak the entire time. He never showed that he had power so that the audience could see the obvious loss of power. The second act was good because the voice fit well into Lear’s dissention into Alzheimer’s, but I never saw his journey because he sounded the same the entire play. Then, when I saw the play on the last night with my mom, I realized that he was only 37, much younger than Lear’s actual age. He normally looks like this:
He was wonderful at playing an old man, physically and vocally. His consistency overshadowed his bad character portrayal. But then I had to remember that he still had to be true to the character, so yes he was believable as an old man but I still didn’t agree with his acting choices. His voice sounded like an old man's voice, but what's the point of putting all the work into creating that voice if no one can hear it.
I understood the journey for the King Lear the most through the set. For both of the productions that I saw, I sat toward the front (first or second row) center section of the theatre. I was lucky to sit there not only because I could see Lear's nuances very clearly because the actor was used to a smaller space but also because I felt like I was part of the show. Right before the beginning of the storm, the tall strong walls of the beautiful palace collapsed in all different directions. The two walls in the back fell forward towards the audience, and once it hit the ground I could feel a big gust of cold wind hit my face, along with sprinkles of water from the "rain" pouring down through the mesh ceiling. I felt as if I was in the storm. This is the turning point in the play when Lear officially transitions into crazy. I literally saw his collapse of power and his downfall in the set. It all correlated. The set looked bare and disheveled, demonstrating his defeat and loneliness.
In the storm scene, King Lear is so weak, crazy, defeated, vulnerable, and practically naked to the world, that he actually strips completely naked on stage. Some people had an issue with this and it has been a very controversial subject. The younger kids did not see the version with full frontal male nudity, but the seniors and other productions included that. I think that it wasn't so necessary to the plot that the younger kids missed out on anything and it probably wouldn't be appropriate for them. I understand the purpose of the nudity because it explains and demonstrates a lot about Lear and his state of mind. The lead up to the nudity was worse than the actual stripping because it was so built up that we couldn't laugh that it made me anxious.
All in all, the production made me cry and think, which are my two favorite results of theatre. I believed all the characters and understood their relationships. Most of all, I understood everything that was said, and that's one of the hardest parts of doing Shakespeare productions. Props to the Dallas Theatre Center for proving to me once again why I love acting and Shakespeare.
