Shakespeare demands rigor—which is obvious, but bears repeating when you consider how many cold, flabby Shakespeare productions get forced down audiences' throats each year.
Shakespeare demands physical rigor from actors and intellectual rigor from directors who must understand the plays' durability and have the courage and good sense to fuck with them. We shouldn't crawl toward Shakespeare on our hands and knees to kiss the hem of his garment. We should hurl ourselves at him, reach into his mouth, pull out his guts, and have the respect—yes, respect—to make more of Shakespeare than simpleminded line readings while wearing goofy Renaissance Faire costumes. Sterile reverence is the sincerest form of battery.
Fringe theaters routinely screw up Shakespeare plays because their actors and directors don't have the confidence, experience, or courage to make them new. (And many commit the unpardonable crime of acting and directing in order to impress casting directors from big regional theaters, an impulse that will neuter any project they lay their hands to.)
But King Lear, by a new fringe company called Rough Play Productions, shows some spirit, even if some of its actors—including Richard Clairmont as Lear—are a little anemic.
Director Paul Budraitis has dressed them in coveralls, given a few whiteface, and designed a simple set: in the center, a shallow pool with flagstones; on the fringes, a few blocks of wood. Before the first word, as Lear meditates on the kingdom he's about to divide between his daughters, he digs his hands into a wooden bucket of black earth.
Budraitis deploys symbols and slowness to help us to understand the play word for word. This is a literary Lear—careful, explicit, its actors thinking through their performances—but it never achieves the heat of life. (Which may be partly intentional: Budraitis is a devotee of the Meyerhold "biomechanics" method, named after Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold, who eschewed the psychological realism of Stanislavski.)
To his credit, Budraitis makes sure we get all the sex references, which are usually glazed over. For Lear's "let copulation thrive" speech, Clairmont outlines a woman with his hands, then kneels and groans into her crotch: "To the girdle do the gods inherit... There's hell, there's darkness, there's the sulphurous pit/Burning, scalding, stench, consumption." Clairmont is a gray-haired, thick-fingered Lear—he looks something like Anthony Hopkins—but lacks the skill to drag us down with him. Only Daniel Brockley (as the malevolent Edmund) and Tony Driscoll (as Kent, the virtuous nobleman) imbue their roles with hot blood. The rest is edifying, but not invigorating.
The actors in Henry IV—at Seattle Shakespeare Company—are more competent, but its director Stephanie Shine is less adventurous. This three-hour collapsing of Henry IV, which is normally two plays, takes a light interpretation and declines to gaze into the story's abyss.
Henry IV is really the tragedy of Falstaff, the fat, witty, tavern philosopher who is in love—gay or straight, your choice—with the prince of England. Falstaff is the heir of Diogenes and the forerunner of Nietzsche: not a clown, but a drunken nihilist who has no faith in religion nor government. His comedy rises from a deep vein of darkness, but this Falstaff—played by Richard Ziman—is all sunshine. As are his pub cronies, dressed in Ren-Faire costumes and constantly cackling. (Just once, I'd like to see Pistol, Nym, and the gang played like hard men at a dive bar—who laugh only when there's something to laugh at—instead of buffoons.)
Though Ziman never plumbs Falstaff's depths, he splashes prettily in the shallows with capering, precisely arched eyebrows, and well-timed punch lines. But without a peek into his secret sadness, the final scene when Prince Hal finally dumps Falstaff ("I know thee not, old man") seems more like a weird coda than the awful, inevitable crash in the fat philosopher's fall.
Shine also imagines Prince Hal (an exuberant Tim Gouran) as too noble, not the conniving asshole that he is. Early in the play, he describes himself as the sun and Falstaff, et al. as "base contagious clouds" that "smother up [my] beauty from the world." Just as Ziman never lets us glimpse Falstaff's sadness, Gouran never cracks Hal's cruelty.
By contrast, David Pichette as Hal's angry father—King Henry IV—is a study in polyphonic range. The lean, graying Pichette scrapes out every nook and cranny of Henry's anguish at his dissolving kingdom and dissolute son. Unfortunately for this production, Henry IV's title role is a secondary one.
Ultimately, Shine's Henry IV is too prim—funny, but afraid to dirty its hands with the messy love and sadness at its core. That isn't just excessive reverence for Shakespeare, it's excessive reverence for the safe, clean pedestal we've put Shakespeare on. And that reverence is deadly. 
