Arts & Events

"Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! ... " When Michael Needham, playing King Lear in the Inferno Theatre/Actors Ensemble co-production in the old amphitheater Berkeley Shakes used perform in, up in Hinkel Park, blew onstage with his Fool (Jody Christian in an active, playful role, also cast as a forthright Cordelia) for the fabled Storm Scene, his imprecation could've been taken for a marker of the end of summer, another prediction of El Niño wetness this winter, in the last free performance on Labor Day of Shakespeare's stupendous tragedy ... 

A few days later, it's finally cooling off a little--and if summer for most people ends with Labor Day, free Shakespeare at Hinkel doesn't--TheatreFIRST opens Much Ado About Nothing, directed by Jon Tracy, this Saturday the 12th and Sunday the 13th at 4, through October 4.  

Inferno's Lear, directed by founder Guilio Perrone, was an ambitious show for small companies like Inferno and AE--cast of 16, many of them new to the companies and to Perrone's style of direction and staging. Last summer the companies cooperated on a shortened version of Heinrich von Kleist's difficult Penthesilea, the encounter before Troy of Achilles with the Queen of the Amazons, a wild tale of love and carnage. This time, with Lear--cut down to two hours fifteen minutes and deliberately staged as a kind of androgynous family romance (to use the Freudian term), woman playing five male roles, including a clear-voiced, sad-eyed Gloucester (Susannah Wood) and a vicious Cornwall (Vicki Victoria), plucking out Gloucester's eyes while a cackling Regan (Christina Shonkwiler) heaves the accordion--Inferno/AE essayed perhaps the most intense, ferocious masterpiece in the English language repertory.  

King Lear's difficult stuff to do for anyone. I think I've only seen two stage versions ever that were satisfying for the whole measure of the play--and one quite a surprise, turning out, on later investigation, to be an actor-driven achievement of ensemble playing. Other productions, including one at the Old Vic with a notable director (Jonathan Miller) and ensemble (Eric Porter as the King)--excepting (and this proved to be a drain on the rest) a poor, overacting Edgar--prove "bitty" ... this scene or even moment, that actor's performance are what stick in the memory or hold one rapt at some point during a long show. (The Old Vic performance, with plenty of memorable moments, was in many ways bogged down by the Storm Scene ... ) 

There were those moments peculiar to the Inferno/AE show--I've hinted at some already--that I won't forget. Like last year with Penthesilea, the searching--maybe not always successfully finding--intent of the dramaturgy was like a dark glow beneath, behind every tableau on the dirt killing floor of the amphitheater. And this production's Edgar--Scott Hartman--was sympathetic, adroit as he tiptoed out into the storm, pretending to be the mad, half-naked Tom O'Bedlam, a counterpoint to the truly mad King and his occupationally mad and playful Fool, all backed by flamenco-esque chords on the guitar. Tom O'Bedlam finishes his speech like Nebuchadnezzar on all fours, a beast in the field, flanked by Lear and the Fool in a kind of manic kids' game of leapfrog ... and they all dance, with drapery blowing in the wind.  

There were rushed lines, lines thrown away in the style of Shakespeare Festivalese ... And there was also Melissa Clason's defiant, not-quite-feral Goneril, the most willful and proud of the villains, daughter of the errant hero ...  

And the best scenes and moments began with the Storm Scene, after the intermission. 

Orson Welles said the biggest problem of staging Shakespeare in America was that Americans imagined a king to be a gentleman with a crown instead of a hat. There was sometimes this problem in carriage of some of the noble characters, a lack of gravity--and I've seen this a great deal in Shakespeare productions lately--but there was also the last-minute subbing-in that Benoit Monin did as Albany, with dignity and naturalness ...  

Trying to stage a masterpiece as down to earth that's been so often overproduced as high (falutin') tragedy--not just as some kind of off-balance, half-Everyman populist set piece of a king stuck in the mud with the homeless, becoming a man of the people, as some have struggled to make it--is a major task of revaluation, and Giulio Perrone has painted a canvas with provocative tableaux--Lear charging onstage into a chance encounter with Edgar and Gloucester, a fallen king wreathed in ivy--""They flattered me like a dog!" Or Edgar reading the letter that reveals the daughters' idyll with his evil brother Edmund ... Lear and Cordelia led away as prisoners: "We two alone will sing like birds in the cage"--and Lear's wail with the dead Cordelia under his arm ...  

Maybe most important of all, Giulio Perrone has found a cast he can work with on a bigger scale than he's been able to before, with his half-dozen years of Inferno, mostly staging shows he's written himself, showing other sides of classics (The Iliad) and popular fictions (Dracula). Those unmentioned so far are: Karina McLoughlin, Tenya Spillman, Adam Eldar, Karen Caronna, Soheil Alamkhel, Paul Davis, Nic Griffin (the musician) and David Andres Mejia. Behind the scenes were Jamie Greenblatt, Phred Swain-Sugarman, Stephen Golux, Andrej Diamantstein, Robert Gudmundson and Jerome Solberg. I'm looking forward to future shows