Lear

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: theatre critics really ought to be licensed before they are entrusted with the powerful responsibility of pronouncing verdicts on productions. At the very least, they should be expected to do their homework before presuming to share their brilliant opinions (not!) with tens of thousands of readers. The critics from the major dailies pretty much uniformly lambasted Young Jean Lee’s Lear at Soho Rep, all of them unintentionally revealing their own limitations rather than hers. Fortunately it didn’t prevent her enthusiastic fans from selling out this show, and then selling out the extension. I consider myself lucky that a last minute cancellation allowed me access to an incredible experience.

Half the time critics go around bewailing the fact that there is nothing new to see; then, when something genuinely new comes along they express outrage that it doesn’t fit their preconceived notions of what theatre is supposed to be. Make up your minds! Accordingly, the general tone of critical reaction to Lear was one of bewilderment that we weren’t served up some version of Shakespeare’s King Lear, or at the very least some kind of conventional show. “It fell apart at the end”, said one reviewer. I’ve heard that one before. Young Jean Lee’s technique is collage-like. She ignores most aesthetic rules about how to build and shape a play script, throwing out plot, consistency of character, and any number of other typical dogmas, not so much writing in antithesis to the norms, but into the nooks and crannies around them. What makes her work unique is that it not (as in the work of so many) coldly formal, but unexpectedly moving. Her thoughts, her fears, her sorrows, bubble up through the writing as though she were jotting down a diary in the margins of a playscript on a similar subject, and then presented all the words on the page as the final text. Lear accordingly becomes a meditation on death, life and the theatre itself. As usual, she gets a lot of comic mileage from having iconic figures occasionally speak mundane slacker-talk (an affect amplified by the high-toned period set and costumes). This abuts all manner of other scraps, from actual sections of Shakespeare’s play, to a 4^th-wall shattering where one of the actors actually invites us to leave (no one did), to a heartfelt monologue about her own father’s terminal illness, to (most notoriously) an enactment of the famous episode of Sesame Street where Big Bird is confronted with the fact of Mr. Hooper’s death. The latter is more moving than you can imagine, respectfully acted by the capable cast (and why wouldn’t it be, since Young Jean Lee is also the director).

Michael Feingold pleased me immensely in his recent Village Voice column not only in reviewing Lear, but by displaying a deep understanding and appreciation of it. It’s nice when someone Up There “gets it”. His one major criticism of the play is also valid. As Young Jean Lee continues to develop her technique, she is going to have to grapple with the very practical problem of how to sustain audience interest throughout a full-length play without the suspense of a clear narrative. It’s a problem that can be solved, though – variety theatre does it all the time. Where drama is not the agenda, theatricality (what Eisenstein called “attractions”) will do very nicely.

Young Jean Lee’s work reminds me of Frank Gehry’s. Like it or hate it, it will not be escaped, the playwright’s statement is unmistakable: I AM HERE. To me, real theatre is nothing if it is not metaphysical in this way. I was recently telling an old friend that I’d reviewed hundreds of shows over the past decade, and that indie theatre is amazing, exciting, there’s never been a moment like this. But when she asked me who my favorite artists were, I could name several actors but no playwrights. Since I have been exposed to Young Jean Lee’s work, all that has changed.