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King Lear
Written by William ShakespeareDirected by William Johnson and Cynthia Lammel
King Lear is one of Shakespeare’s great tragedies and arguably his finest achievement as a dramatist. Foremost among the play’s qualities are the universality of its concerns, which have allowed it to play with contemporary urgency to audiences everywhere since The King’s Men fi rst performed it at The Globe Theatre in London in 1606. Shakespeare sets his tragedy in an unspecifi ed past and based the character of Lear on one of the mythical Kings of ancient Britain famous in folklore and written about in Holinshed’s Chronicles. The general plot, characters and social/political circumstances depict the world as Shakespeare knew it. The particulars, though, of the relationships, human desires and confl icts between and within the characters are ones that continue to drive the events of our own world and propel us through the trials of our own lives. Each of us is a son or a daughter to parents who are aging, aged or passed. Many of us are ourselves parents. Most of us will eventually come to seem old and in the way to others, though we still feel eighteen inside. All of us, bar none, want what we want and strive to get it. How do deal with those who get in our way? Are we fated by nature or God to behave one way or another? Are our actions and reactions a matter of divine predestination and our DNA? Or do we have the capacity to learn from our own experiences and empathize with the experiences of others? If it is within us all to choose between cruelty and kindness, what makes the difference?
