Performance  Dates: April 25 and 26, May 2, 3, 8, 9, 10 at 8 PM
and May 4 and 11 at 3 PM

Tickets: $15  (Seniors: $13;  Students: $10; groups of five or more students: $5 each;
and groups of 10 or more adults:  $10 each)

Thurs., May 8: Pay-What-You-Can.

---

King Lear: Social Insecurity and Dangerous Shakespeare

King Lear is the darkest and most fundamentally nihilistic play in Shakespeare's canon, darker than Measure for Measure, steeped in blood and brutality in ways even Titus Andronicus is not.  For the better part of two more genteel centuries, from 1681 to 1838, the rewritten, 'happy ending' version of Irish poet Nahum Tate dominated the stage, with its fascinating and telling claim that "Morals were alwaies proper for the Stage/But are ev'n necessary in this Age."
 
In an age in which morals were considered not only 'proper' but 'necessary' for the stage, Lear was too dangerous to touch in its original form.  Too ugly, too spiked, too characteristic of the
complexity and moral ambiguity of Shakespeare's tragedies.  It languished, but survived, kept alive in an odd little skiff of improbable romance between Cordelia, Lear's youngest daughter, and Edgar, the legitimate son of Gloucester, Lear's old friend, complete with a happy ending in which Lear survives and makes Cordelia queen.
 
The particular nihilism of Shakespeare's King Lear is grounded in his alterations to his sources; in Holinshead's Chronicles, Cordelia wins the war, defeats her treacherous sisters and restores Lear to his throne. Shakespeare's vastly darker choices are accompanied and reinforced by a studied vagueness of time and geography, a sense that we are as blind as Gloucester, with little idea of where we are from scene to scene.  Like him, we must 'see it feelingly,' a play driven entirely by the raw passions of its characters, in which the sense of place is unimportant.
 
Cedar Lane Stage's version of Lear is stripped equally bare; director Edward Starr presents it very much as Shakespeare must have, with only a single chair on set, the props and costumes a fiercely postmodern mélange of old and new, pre-Christian Briton and stark 21st century. The end result is raw, a fevered, physical exploration of Shakespeare's darkest work, in which Lear is ultimately responsible for his own fall and descent into madness.  By abdicating his throne and dividing his kingdom, he overturns the natural order, and in denying the Divine Right of Kings, he rejects God.  From that moment, he is fundamentally excommunicate, his fall assured, and neither the aid of his beloved Cordelia nor the vicious machinations of his elder daughters, Goneril and Regan, have the power to alter that downward spiral.  Lear's doom is inevitable.  He pronounced it on himself, with a great deal of fanfare and self-love, in the first act.

CAST

Sherry Berg Kelli Biggs Jaki Demerest Nello DeBlasio David Dieudonne Bret Estey David Gorseline Dan Guy Eric Henry Louis Pangaro Mike Platt Christopher Tully Jeffrey Wendel Tom Witherspoon

Cordelia Regan Goneril Edmund Fool Albany France Kent Oswald Lear Burgundy/Doctor| Edgar Cornwall Gloucester