The Sincerest Form of Battery

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.