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Truth in Maddness

“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!” King Lear admonished one of his evil daughters in Shakespeare’s play of the same name. And that adage captures the theme of the drama, a grim homily reinforcing that commandment to honour thy father and thy mother.

But Shakespeare includes the caveat that a parent has an obligation not to be seduced by the flattery and subterfuge of those ungrateful children. And in King Lear, the point is made not only in the drama of the foolish king himself and his three daughters, but in the subplot involving the Earl of Gloucester and his two sons.

Door Shakespeare, performing in the Garden of Björklunden (Lawrence University’s off-campus property near Baileys Harbor), returns with yet another season of classical theater. This summer the tragedy of King Lear and the Comedy of Errors are offered in repertory, the latter is frothy as the former is dark.

The performance space is literally under the stars, the audience seated on flexible risers, the stage a level wood-chipped area on the turf under a giant maple tree. And as with the bard’s productions in the original Globe Theater, the audience is called upon both to suspend disbelief and to utilize imagination, as the play is performed without set pieces, only minimal bits of furniture.

But the magic of theater comes alive in this garden staging, and the natural setting (even when the evening is as cool as to allow the audience to see the breath of the actors!) adds to the ambience of the performance. Richly costumed professional players bring Shakespeare’s classic text to life, and judicious editing confines the “traffic of the stage” to an outdoors-audience friendly two hours.

The star of Lear is the king himself (and director as well), Richard Ooms, whose characterization, alternating between a bombast that tempts fate and a poignancy that brings tears to a witness, creates an ambivalence that both unsettles and engages the audience. The two elder wicked daughters, who sweet talk their father into dividing his kingdom between them, are fun to hate, larger than life in their evil manipulations, and well-deserve their ultimate fates.

The motif of truth in madness is the glue that holds the play together: the fool (an androgenous character usually male but amply performed here by veteran actress and assistant director Claudia Wilkens) provides bitter truth under the guise of clowning; the Duke of Gloucester’s falsely accused son Edgar, disguised as the nearly naked Poor Tom the beggar, sees clearly; as does the faithful Earl of Kent, dressed as a commoner as he attends Lear; and Lear himself, descending into an unfeigned madness after the rejection by his oldest daughters and the eventual self-realization that he has wronged his youngest and most faithful daughter, speaks words of wisdom in his dementia.

A number of high points shine in the play. One is the costuming of Lear’s daughters, similar gowns that not only suggest siblings, but conjure an image of three connected Fates. Another is the effective creation of the thunder and lightening in Lear’s famous rainstorm. While the frequent swordplay is of practical necessity stylized, the plucking of Gloucester’s eyes is performed with shocking realism. And the image that the audience will carry from the theater is that of the ancient grief-stricken Lear stumbling on stage carrying the body of his faithful daughter Cordelia.

The flawed hero Lear speaks truth when he maintains “I am a man more sinned against than sinning,” as does his tragic counterpart Gloucester who asserts, “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.” At play’s end, the body count is high.

The enjoyment of a performance of Shakespeare admittedly requires more effort on the part of an audience than does that of most contemporary fare, but the text can demonstrate amazing possibilities of language and offer profound insight into universal humanity. Door Shakespeare, which has become a dramatic fixture on the peninsula, is to be commended for their success in bringing Shakespeare’s work to life, and in this production of King Lear, they are especially to be congratulated.

The alternate production The Comedy of Errors is the story of identical twin brothers with identical twin servants, all separated at birth and reunited with comedic mistaken identifies. Coincidentally, Strings Attached, performed this summer by American Folklore Theatre at the opposite shore of the peninsula, is a farcical adaptation of Comedy of Errors. Consider a paired theater experience.

The Door Shakespeare season extends through August 16, with Comedy of Errors performed Tuesdays and Thursday at 8 pm, Saturdays at 5 pm; and King Lear, Wednesdays and Fridays at 8, Saturdays at 8:30 pm. For information and tickets, visit doorshakespeare.com or call 920.839.1500.