“King Lear” at the Public
When we moved my grandfather to an assisted living community in Virginia, it was only after my dad jumped through all the requisite hoops. I’m not referring to legal logistics — the more important hoops were the obligatory late night phone conversations between siblings: my father and his sisters. We had, bizarrely, a black corded rotary phone in the laundry room. It was the most inconvenient phone. It is the one I remember my dad standing by, brow furrowed, trying to make provisions for “the next big fall” and puzzling out whether it was safe any longer to leave Buddy in his apartment in Boston. To me, he was a former patriarch being plucked from our New England facsimile of an Ancestral Home. I’d basically never fucking been to Boston, but I was raised in Virginia as a Red Sox expatriate.
John Lithgow’s King Lear, running at Shakespeare in the Park at The Public Theater this summer, is occasionally clunky. It relies too much on the ravenous energy of its star players rather than yielding something virtuosic from their obviously substantial talents. But its great victory is its setup, not its punchline. An always-present fear is at the heart of even the early signs of Lear’s dementia. Lithgow’s first act (and they are his acts; if someone calls this anyone’s Lear but Lithgow’s, they’re not paying attention) is what unspools the rest of the action. The inevitability he creates is Greek-Tragedy level haunting.
Long before he is cast out and ruined, Lear is confused. He is quick to generosity and equally quick to wrath. Lithgow’s pivots in this are fierce and immediate — they are wild swings in a dark room, desperate attempts to both reorient himself and dispatch any enemies who would prey on his confusion. The result is that those standing behind him in solidarity or service suddenly find themselves on the less preferable side of his blows. Which is what it’s like.
My experience with dementia patients is limited, but every time we visited, I counted myself lucky to feel like a stranger. At first I was sad not to be anyone to Buddy anymore. But strangers, when they have a smile on their face, usually stay safe. Not so for the children.
Did Benjamin Franklin name Poor Tom’s Almanac after this play?
There is a progression in thought about parenthood towards a sort of idealistic altruism. You owe your children everything you have — and in return, you must expect nothing from them. It sounds a little like the way Protestants think about God. Do not ask your children to: play sports, marry the opposite sex, live close to you, take over your family business, express any interest in anything that you care about or validate you or your ego in any way. But what when the parent falls apart? What when the parent sees herself falling apart? What if she has the humility to ask for help, for lodging, for support? Conditional love is not enough to sate the gnawing fear bred by the growing fog. Only unconditional, and Goneril (Annette Bening) and Regan (Jessica Hecht) and even Cordelia (Jessica Collins) do not have that to offer. I wasn’t inclined to blame them. I was thinking too much of my dad, and his sisters, trapped on the phone in the laundry room.
Lithgow himself is braver than brave, and when the play drags, it does so usually because the ensemble cannot catch up to his incredible sense of immediacy. He is alive, staggering up and down a razor’s edge which holds the rest of the ensemble accountable. His Lear reflects craftsmanship as well as charisma. It is a wrought iron chair — he builds it with care and fidelity in the first half, and thank god it bears the profound weight of his second. When he was finished, I left with Nik Aliye and wrote this blog, and got an uneasy feeling about Alzheimer’s disease when I had to ask three people to help me remember the what word “altruism” was.
