Hitting the high note

The daunting spectre of Lear

by Bill Rodriguez

How puzzling. King Lear is one of the major tragedies of Shakespeare's none too shabby oeuvre, and yet it is rarely staged. Why is that?

"It's terrifying," answers Fred Sullivan, who is directing the current production at SFGT, nee Alias Stage.

"It's enormous," suggests Sam Babbitt, who is portraying that poster boy for woeful paternal behavior.

Lear not being produced is like "The Star Spangled Banner" not being sung anymore because it's too awe-inspiring and too hard to hit that damn high note.

The high note in King Lear could be any of several lofty aspects, all notoriously hard to reach. There is the transcendental arrogance of a king who we are asked to believe would disown his most loving daughter in favor of the two who despise him. That isn't easy to make psychologically convincing. Then there is his mad scene on the heath, which invites scenery chewing. There are other moments in this over-wrought Elizabethan roller coaster that are also difficult to enact. Nineteenth-century critic Charles Lamb went so far as to declare that the besieged king was "essentially impossible to be represented on a stage," since the volcanic inner turmoil of the man could never be equaled by stagecraft.

Less than a century after the tragedy was first produced, the poet laureate of England cobbled together a smiley-face version of King Lear in which the major characters live happily ever after instead of dying.

"People were bothered tremendously, all through the 19th century too," said Babbitt. "They wanted to turn it into a religious redemption: it's all going to work out, and everyone's forgiven them. They've been through hell, but it's really gonna be fine."

His white hair and beard unshorn since January, all the better to be storm tossed in a tempest, Babbitt sat down to talk after a recent rehearsal.

Needless to say, an actor has to take a deep breath and stoke a fire in the belly to play a role described as unplayable, one which many in the audience will be comparing to film interpretations by no less than Alec Guinness and Paul Scofield. Babbitt has been acting in small theaters since 1977 and in recent years has worked on occasional TV and radio commercials. President of the board of directors at Alias Stage, he has frequently been tapped to impressive effect for eminence gris roles there, such as the fatuous Polonius in Hamlet last year. He is retired as senior development administrator at Brown University.

Nevertheless, playing Lear with self-assurance was hardly automatic.

"I got myself into a terrible place before we started by listening to John Gielgud's tapes. And they were" -- here Babbitt enunciates with orotund tones -- "splendidly mellifluous."

His initial tendency was to declaim Lear's lines rather than say them more naturally and let Shakespeare take care of the profundity and the majestic music.

"The words are so damn beautiful that you do want to sing them," he said.

Director Sullivan, sitting next to him in a front row seat in the theater, shouted in basso profundo illustration: " `Hence and avoid my sight!' You know, you really want to sing that out and be operatic with it. In this case, it's so much more effective to have somebody look a daughter in the eye and say" -- here he whispers -- " `Hence, and avoid my sight' -- I don't want to look at you, I want you out of my sight."

Babbitt looked around at the perhaps 20'x20' stage area, enclosed on two sides by seats, and pointed out that Sullivan's intimate take on King Lear could be especially effective, and appropriate, here.

The director brought up something an actor colleague at Trinity Repertory Company observed about another play Sullivan directed in that space. "Brian McEleney came to see Hamlet, and what he said he liked about it was that it took this grand and glorious -- as Sam said, `pageant' -- and broke it down into a very intimate story about two families. And that history is much what this is about: a very intimate story about two families, the Lear family and the Gloucester family."

Sullivan observed that there is profound appeal to the tale on a basic human level. The reason, he said, that the movie Titanic has been so successful is that "we want to see how people survive in a situation that is bigger than themselves." The same is true of Lear and Gloucester: "These people were cast out on the heath in this Beckett landscape, in this nothingness."

The timing of this production for Sullivan, a 15-year veteran at Trinity, was difficult. He'd just concluded the most intense season of his career there, doing a virtually gymnastic Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream and portraying high-energy leads in Peer Gynt and The Music Man. So he just wanted to relax and begin puttering around in his garden. But he says that directing Babbitt in Lear was an exciting prospect he couldn't turn down.

To Alias Stage theater-goers who have in the last year seen Sullivan direct the most consistently impressive off-Trinity theater around here in ages, the prospect certainly was hopeful.

In 1681, a fool may have rewritten and brightened up King Lear because it was "a Heap of Jewels, unstrung and unpolisht." But in 1998 we're apparently tougher than back then. And the talent involved in this production may very well string Shakespeare's dramatic jewels into something dazzling indeed.

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