Theater Review: "King Lear," at the Shakespeare Theater of New Jersey

With less than a week before it closes, I urge my faithful readers to hie thee down—pronto!—to Madison, N.J., for the Shakespeare Theater of New Jersey's (STNJ) no-nonsense production of William Shakespeare's King Lear.

I first visited STNJ nearly two years ago, for a laudable version of Richard III directed by Vivienne Benesch. Ever since then, I’ve ached to return. Last weekend, when the chance presented itself, I pounced, and was not disappointed.

If you’ve never visited STNJ, it’s on the campus of Drew University. The sylvan surroundings in which the ivied buildings encourage the delightful illusion that you’ve stumbled into The Bard’s Forest of Arden.

As with Richard III, however, I saw King Lear on the festival’s main stage, the F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theater, an intimate setting where you’re never too far too see the action or hear the actors. Now in its 10th season as an adaptive reuse of an old gymnasium, the theater promises to get many more good seasons in, if the theater's management maintains its sure grip on audiences.

The current offering, King Lear, is not a sublime version of The Bard's arguable zenith as tragedian (the prime example, for my money, is the 1984 TV adaptation with Laurence Olivier, Diana Rigg, and Colin Blakely), but neither does it take the monstrously wrongheaded approach to Shakespeare memorably sent up by Richard Dreyfuss in Neil Simon’s The Goodbye Girl. (You remember—Richard III played by Richard Dreyfuss as a lisping, limping, flaming queen rather than the usual grinning villain. Thank God Paul Mullins didn’t try this in the production I saw!)

What STNJ has done, under the accomplished helmsmanship of artistic director Bonnie J. Monte, is reason itself for celebration: Highlight, without nonsense weighing like barnacles, the major themes in the script—and, in the commanding performance of Daniel Davis, a Lear who, for all his foolish cantankerousness, remains every inch a king.

If your cultural tastes run more to sitcom than to classic theater, you're likely to recognize Davis from his six seasons as Niles the Butler on The Nanny. (Question: Why has TV taken to calling persnickety males “Niles”? Just asking.)

More’s the pity if that’s how you remember him, since the 62-year-old actor has appeared in all but six of Shakespeare’s play. The experience of watching him on Fran Drescher’s show won't prepare you for his turn here as the First Angry Man—the monarch who sent his kingdom hurtling toward a chaotic civil war with a mad plan to divide up his kingdom among his daughters, following a can-you-top-this contest in which he urges each daughter in turn express just how much she loves him.

Nowadays, I'm afraid you have to venture over to the Mideast (if you dare) to find a people with firsthand experience of how a hereditary ruler's caprice can rend a nation. In the West, where democracies or toothless constitutional monarchies hold sway, the closest equivalent to this situation would be the CEO of a family-run corporation who, anxious to enjoy sunny days in Florida, steps down—only to come charging back when he can’t stand how his handpicked successor is ruining the company and/or taking it in directions he doesn’t approve.

This sociopolitical element of Elizabethan-Stuart England has been lost, but the people of the West, facing the horrors of the 20th and 21st centuries, might find parallels in how to confront a radical evil born of resentment. They need only look at Shakespeare’s expert subplot involving the Earl of Gloucester, his legitimate son Edgar and his illegitimate one, Edmund.

Just as Gloucester and Edgar cannot credit until it’s almost too late that Edmund could turn on them, so the West has had all too much experience with dictators who use the Big Lie to attain power. Decent to a fault, Gloucester and Edmund are also frequently ineffectual in stopping the spread of this virus of power-grabbing and violence.

In this production, however, audiences will identify—perhaps even more powerfully now, in societies where longevity has increasingly stretched—with families flummoxed and split by the growing frailty of a parent. You will not be staggered by the evil perpetrated by Goneril, Regan and Edmund here, as in other productions—the cast members who bring them to life (Krisite Dale Sanders, Victoria Mack, and Marcus Dean Fuller) make them as familiar to us as the roiling emotions on display in so many American homes every Thanksgiving meal.

Cordelia (played endearingly by Erin Partin) enters smiling, her arm hooked in her father’s and singing softly to him. No doubt this is Daddy’s Little Girl—which makes it all the more shocking when she takes umbrage at the vanity contest for his benefit that her father is conducting. The ensuing conversation between Goneril and Regan is staged fast and sotto voce, but with all kinds of clues that previous confusion about their father’s quirks is crystallizing into recognition that he’s not the man—or powerful overlord—he once was.

It helps to have a Lear of simultaneous strength and complexity who can galvanize the plot, and this company has one in Davis. Watch in particular the Act II confrontation with Goneril and Regan, a progression from “I may go mad” to “I will go mad.” Listen to the dignified, proud reading of the “O, reason not the need” speech that accomplishes the gradual shift in audience reaction to his character from annoyance to empathy; watch how Davis clutches his arm to suggest the medical problems that might be undermining the strength and position of this once-vigorous monarch; and catch his weary trudge offstage, when he understands fully how much he has lost, politically and personally.

Especially, marvel at his final scene, when he transports the production, as his character lifts Cordelia’s corpse, to another emotional plane entirely, with a bellow of sorrow that is not merely moving but shattering. The whole unmannered but distinctive effect reminds me of Katharine Hepburn’s description of Spencer Tracy’s acting style: "He was a baked potato: solid, and you can have them without salt and pepper or butter.”

Mention should also be made here of several other noteworthy aspects of this production:

* With his blond hairdo, Matt Bradford Sullivan plays Regan’s husband, the Duke of Cornwall, like an aging Draco Malfoy, spoiled by access to privilege, with an unhealthy propensity to grasp even more power.

* As the Earl of Kent, Ames Adamson delivers an onstage acting lesson in how to milk one speech—the dressing-down of Goneril’s toadying servant Oswald—in a manner that the playwright himself would undoubtedly applaud if he could: blunt, vigorous, fiercely loyal, the kind of friend you’d want in a fight for your life.

* Steven Rosen’s exemplary lighting scheme grows darker as the play progresses, paralleling the increasingly harsh universe in which Lear finds himself at bay.

* Ms. Monte’s triumph is to present a real case of “shock and awe” onstage—our stunned recognition of losses that have occurred in this regression from a kingdom of order to a Hobbesian state of nature, and our renewed reverence for the forces of love and loyalty that light, however uncertainly, an increasingly bleak world.