Lee's LEAR: Beyond Shakespeare

A lot of critics have weighed in on Young Jean Lee's LEAR--closing Sunday at SoHo Rep--in which the controversial playwright has cherry-picked the younger characters from King Lear as a springboard for her own purposes, a matter of staring, with diminishing distractions and buffers, at unavoidable realities of conscience, aging and dying. Sold out now even into its extension, LEAR is a tantalizing dish, neither faithful to Shakespeare in its fashion nor an absolutely clean break. Some people are getting tripped up in the in-between and suggesting that Lee has tripped up there, too. But I think LEAR is sold out because people have heard that SoHo Rep's production really rocks. This meta-banal-Buddhist-absurdist piece with a bruised heart at its core boasts absorbing, skilled performances from the three women in the cast--April Matthis (Regan), Okwui Okpokwasili (Goneril) and especially, super-clever Amelia Workman (Cordelia), King Lear's daughters. The look of the show rocks, too--a depiction of constricted people appropriately encased on a narrow stage that is, nevertheless, decked out in Elizabethan finery (as are the characters in smashing costumes and jewelry), a lush setting that looks simultaneously plausible and fake. The 80-minute production includes excellent work by Raquel Davis (lighting), David Evans Morris (set), Roxana Ramseur (costumes) and Dean Moss (choreography and stage movement).

More on LEAR here

Hear Young Jean Lee discuss LEAR with SoHo Rep's Sarah Benson.