Lear

Written and directed by Young Jean Lee

Young Lean Lee’s Theater Company

Soho Rep

86 Franklin Street

www.sohorep.org

 

Review by Lucy Butcher

 

THE OFFSPRING: Okwui Okpokwasili and April Matthis in Young Jean Lee's Lear (photo: Blaine Davis).

 

Young Jean Lee’s Lear is billed as a heartbreaking tragedy that explores the concept of adult children turning their backs on their aging fathers’ suffering, but this intriguing idea gets lost in the play’s disjointed array of threads.

 

The five-actor musing on Shakespeare’s King Lear centers on old Lear’s daughters — Goneril (Okwui Okpokwasili), Regan (April Matthis) and Cordelia (Amelia Workman) — and Gloucester’s sons — Edmund (Pete Simpson) and Edgar (Paul Lazar). The actors, dressed in lavish Elizabethan costumes, sit in an ornate candlelit parlor, indifferent to the fact that their fathers are out in the storm. Using distinctly un-Shakespearean language, they chatter in pairs and groups, and give monologues that are impossible to extract any meaning from. Edmund complains that anyone who isn’t skeletal looks fat to him; he splutters, “I suck! Everything sucks!” He and Edgar agree that garter belts are “like the hottest thing ever.” Cordelia explains to Goneril that she broke up with France because “one day he just grossed me out.”

 

Towards the end of the play, the actors step out of character. Lazar, in an uninspiring appeal, asks the audience to consider what they are doing with their lives and to “please enjoy this time.” Okpokwasili delivers the King Lear scene in which the title character cries out at the sight of Cordelia, dead: “This feather stirs; she lives!” Then, the actors play out the famous “Sesame Street” episode where Big Bird tries to come to terms with the death of Mr. Hooper. Finally, in the play’s most affecting moment, Simpson gives a heart-wrenching address about his relationship with his dying father. “Nobody loves you like your father does,” he says, describing how he sees his father struggle, yet finds it hard to spend time with him. Rock music and blazing lights symbolize the passage of time, and the play ends.

 

Lear is extremely well acted, but a bit of a disorganized mess; it doesn’t serve up anything important to consider until it’s nearly over. Apart from the final scene, the most coherent moments in the show are the readings from King Lear and “Sesame Street,” which, rather than strengthening Lee’s mix of ideas, remind us of more  captivating storytelling.

 

More Theater Reviews