King Lear at Drayton Hall Theatre

COLUMBIA, SC – April 19, 2013 – Theatre South Carolina will stage Shakespeare’s revered tragedy King Lear, the epic tale of a ruler’s loss of power and descent into madness, April 19-27 at USC’s Drayton Hall Theatre.

Shakespeare’s gale-force drama rips back the curtain on a family torn by greed and an unquenchable lust for power.  The aging King Lear decides to split his kingdom between his three daughters, but tests their loyalty first to finalize the arrangement.  When his most devoted daughter, Cordelia, refuses to flatter him, Lear disowns her, paving the way for a venomous plot to usurp the throne concocted by his remaining heirs.  The King flees, leading him on a spiraling descent into madness as he fights to regain control.  King Lear is a riveting story about the corruptive nature of power and a broken man’s agonizing struggle for redemption.

Cristian Hadji-Culea, a prominent theatre and television director from Romania, will helm the production, giving the well-known tale’s Elizabethan setting a timeless twist. While Shakespeare’s powerful language remains intact, the settings for the story have been modernized, with Lear’s palace taking the form of a tycoon’s headquarters, and the heath to which Lear is banished becoming an urban wasteland.

We want the play to be more comprehensible to today’s public, says the director. To not speak about a medieval king but to speak about the society in which we are living. They can understand how a billionaire can become a beggar.

Scenic designer Nic Ularu explains, It’s like what’s happening in our society. You have the top and the bottom, and from top to bottom is a very large gap. We are showing this in the form of a very aseptic, corporate-looking environment contrasted with an environment where the humans and trash meld together.

Ularu, a native of Romania, has a history with the director. Both worked at the Teatrul Mic in Bucharest in the early nineties, when Hadji-Culea was director of the esteemed theatre.

Cristian is a well-known artist in Romania, with a career spanning over thirty-five years in theatre, Nic says. As an art administrator, he worked in the Romanian Ministry of Culture, and all the theatres in the country were under his supervision. And, he headed Romanian National Television for several years. Now, as the director of the National Theatre of Iasi, he brings some of the best artists in Romania and throughout Europe to his stage. The National Theatre of Iasi is Romania’s oldest theatre’s and among the country’s most distinguished stages.

In addition to a high profile guest director, the production also boasts a cast led by professional Shakespearean actor James Keegan in the role of the tormented king. Keegan comes to the university directly from his most recent work in the critically-acclaimed production of Henry V at the Folger Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, DC (directed by USC associate professor Robert Richmond). For thirteen seasons, Keegan has been a company member at the American Shakespeare Center, a unique theatre which stages Shakespearean works in a manner than recreates the look and feel of productions from the Bard’s own time. For ASC, Keegan has performed over eighty roles in approximately sixty productions, including the title role in King Lear.

Most tragedies are at some level about self-knowledge, and here we have someone who has been king too long and forgotten that he’s merely a man, Keegan says of the doomed ruler. He’s had the power of the gods for too long. Whatever he says, it happens. That means the word is almost the deed, and of course that is a king’s power, but nobody should have the kind of power.

He has to be stripped down to nothing so that he can see what he is — a ‘very foolish fond old man’ — and once he can embrace that, he can start to see where the real value of life is.

Keegan reveals that his connection to the character has taken on even greater personal significance since his last portrayal in 2008 for ASC. The actress playing Lear’s favorite daughter, Cordelia, in that production has since become his actual daughter-in-law.

He remarks about Lear and Cordelia’s redemption scene, We actually used to come off stage from that scene and she would say ‘I love you’ and I would say ‘I love you, too’ because you get very moved in that moment. It’s worked out nicely that she’s ended up being my genuine daughter.

Joining Keegan among the cast is another professional actor (and USC theatre alum), Terry Snead, who will portray Lear’s counterpart, the similarly tragic Earl of Gloucester. Snead is a native of Greenville who has had a thirty-year career as an actor in stage, television and film productions. Additional guest actors include Park Bucker, associate professor at USC Sumter, playing the Duke of Cornwall, and Paul Kaufmann taking the role of the King of France. All eight of the theatre program’s graduate acting students are also cast, including Laurie Roberts (as Cordelia), Leeanna Rubin, Melissa Peters, Kate Dzvonik, James Costello, Josiah Laubenstein, Trey Hobbs and Cory Lipman. The cast also includes Chandler Walpole, Dennis Lopez, John Floyd, Kristina Montgomery, Alex Jones, Kelsea Woods, John Dixon, Daniel Ziegler and Taiyen Stevenson.

Professor Nic Ularu (Obie-winner and recent Grand Prix winner at the Belgrade International Theatre Festival, see article below) has co-designed the postmodern look of the production with first-year design student Billy Love.  Lighting Design is by professional NY designer Todd Wren. Second-year MFA Costume Design student Sean Smith is designing the characters’ avant-garde fashions.  Sound design is by guest artist Danielle Wilson. 

New York Times theatre critic Ben Brantley wrote in 2011 that Lear contains some of the most beautiful and devastating observations ever uttered about the human condition. Hadji-Culea agrees that the story has applications which appeal to a wide range of human experiences.

It’s about the generations, it’s about love, it’s about power, it’s about the existence of God. It’s not just about something.

Show times for King Lear are 8pm Wednesdays-Fridays, 7pm Saturdays and 3pm on the first Sunday. There is an additional half-price late night performance on Saturday, April 27 at 11pm. Tickets for the production are $12 for students, $16 for USC faculty/staff, military personnel and seniors 60+, and $18 for the general public. Tickets can be purchased by calling 803-777-2551 or by visiting the Longstreet Theatre box office, which is open Monday-Friday, 12:30pm-5:30pm, beginning Friday, April 12.

For more information on King Lear or the theatre program at the University of South Carolina, please contact Kevin Bush via email at [email protected] or by phone at (803) 777-9353.