King Lear

Shakespeare has been dead for about 400 years. He wrote for an audience that was just starting to get into colonialism and threw their poop out of windows. Why, then, do we still produce/watch/read/study his plays?

Because they’re stories a multiplicity of people can sink their teeth into. Because they have so many ways to access them. Because of productions like OSF’s close-to-closing King Lear.

My grandpa just died. I loved the guy, and he was the grandpa I was closest to. And grief is a funny thing for me, because I tend to analyze it and over-think it and rob it of its emotional effect by putting it all in my head. Watching Lear and Gloucester get old and die in horribly dramatic ways helped me shed my tears. As an audience member, the play effected me in a way Lear never has before. But as a dramaturg, I have to understand why.

To do that, I want to go back to Aristotle. He holds (and I quote Ingram Bywater’s translation of Poetics) that the “tragic pleasure is that of pity and fear…” (1453b 12) What does that mean? According to Aristotle “…pity is occasioned by undeserved misfortune, and fear by that of one like ourselves…” (1453a 5-6) Lear and Gloucester make mistakes, but do they deserve the extent of their misfortunes? Does the old Lear really deserve to be cast out by his daughters and wander half-naked and mentally unhinged? Does Gloucester deserve to have his eyes ripped out? They aren’t villains, who knowingly sow discord and destruction like Iago. Nor are they heroes who save kin and country like Henry V. No, Lear and Gloucester are “…the intermediate kind of personage, [men] not preeminently virtuous and just, whose misfortune, however, is brought upon [them] not by vice and depravity but by some error of judgment…” (1453a 6-8) So that’s pity. What about fear, the recognition of one like yourself. King Lear needs to have his train of one hundred knights. “Oh, reason not the need. Our basest beggars / Are in the poorest things superfluous. / Allow not nature more than nature needs, / Man’s life’s as cheap as beast’s.” (King Lear II.4 vs.267-270) Sometimes old men struggle with the need to give up those things that they’re accustomed to, that give them a sense of independence. “And, to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind.” (IV.7 vs.62-63) It’s normal for people, when they get older, to feel their minds start to slip. And the humiliation that can come from admitting it was clear in Michael Winters’ performance as the titular king.

That brings us to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Any play with as many access points as Lear is easy to do poorly. So how did Bill Rauch and Company do it well? By trusting the story, and not getting in the way of it. The Aristotelian pity is present in the text, but the Aristotelian fear comes from finding the truth in the text. And there’s no recognition of truth without trust. Rauch enunciated it finely in his program note:

“We have chosen a simple, contemporary approach for this production in our most intimate space to minimize any distance between you and the play’s bracing truths. The designers and I are here to serve the actors, and our entire cast is awash in skill and courage.”

It’s easy, as an artist, to get caught up in your own creativity. It’s much harder to let go and trust your collaborators. And Shakespeare, in spite of being dead and not having had a conception of basic bathroom hygiene, is one of the best collaborators a theater artist can work with. There’s a reason his plays remain popular after 400 years.