King Lear

A Grade A (Minus) King Lear

American Shakespeare Center, Blackfriars Playhouse, Staunton, Virginia
Saturday, April 19, 2025, A–2 (front row left)
Directed by Paul Mason Barnes

Angela Iannone, playing a most ferocious version of the titular character of William Shakespeare's King Lear, stands up to the storm on the heath as the Fool (Summer England) watches in the American Shakespeare Center production of the play at the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia. Photo By Alania Shefelton.

The characters who are still alive at the end of the play kneel on the stage. Those who are lying dead on the stage get up and kneel. Those who died off stage come on stage and kneel. Two by two, the actors stand and step toward the applause from an already standing audience in the packed-to-the-rafters Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia. Last of the kneelers to stand is Angela Iannone, who just played the most ferocious King Lear I’ve ever seen. The crowd volume amps up several digits. With audiences on three sides of the stage, the cast bow front, bow left, bow right, wave, and walk through the curtains at the back. Of course they’ll come back for a curtain call.

But this is a singular and literal curtain call for the last performance of the play's spring run. Before Iannone reaches the curtains, she unleashes a victory cry, thrusts her hands in the air, turns back to the house, and yells again as the audience volume goes to 11. The curtains part, revealing the rest of the cast crowded together, each smiling big, all applauding Iannone. Then they join her for a last bow.

It's rare seeing so much joy—appreciation, yes; joy, no—after a performance of William Shakespeare's King Lear, especially after sobs floated through the playhouse just minutes before. This ovation, though, not only recognized the exquisite presentation of Shakespeare's richly drawn characters we had just seen; it also was visceral expression of what a member of the American Shakespeare Center's staff told me in the lobby before the show: "We're back!"

Specifically, the company is back from the tumultuous conditions laid on it by the Covid pandemic and subsequent organizational upheavals and financial stress. I sensed something special was happening when I couldn't find a ground floor seat until the last weekend of this spring season's Shakespeare repertoire featuring Lear and The Comedy of Errors (I couldn't work in the season's third play, an Erin Riley adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women). The lone seat I could get for Lear was in the front row. That would be a kudo for Bob Uecker, but not for this theater critic who prefers a wider perspective of the stage from a couple rows back. Instead, I was taking notes as inconspicuously as I could and tilting my head back 90 degrees to look up into Poor Tom's bewildered eyeballs rolling back into his skull as his sculpted body leaned out over me there in the front roooww!

The standard of excellence established at the Blackfriars Playhouse over three-plus decades in this rural Virginia town put the American Shakespeare Center in the global top tier of Shakespearean theater. The company's fame came in part from the Blackfriars Playhouse being the world's only re-creation of Shakespeare's indoor theater, but that also is integral to why the ensembles here tend to be so accomplished. Other than being a great space for a play, the playhouse's mission dictates the company's original practice performance standards: universal lighting (no stage lights, house lights always on); no electronic or digital effects (the storm in King Lear was an acoustic creation); no sets (props and acting establish the setting and conditions); use of doubling and cross-gender casting; and direct-address acting to the audience in close proximity to the stage, including "gallant stools" on the stage.

Another standard contributing to the company's enduring excellence is strict dedication to the text divining the characters and their actions. A return to this textual study and delivery—which, by the way, is the secret to making Shakespeare's texts truly accessible to modern audiences—is what makes this Paul Mason Barnes-helmed Lear so riveting.

Nevertheless, one significant tell-tale sign of financial constriction has a bothersome impact on this King Lear: troupe size. With only nine actors instead of the past standard of a dozen, this production cuts the roles of Albany and Cornwall as well as the first scene's France and Burgundy, decisions that had plot and thematic consequences.

With a 45-year, coast-to-coast directing career under his belt, Barnes was making his Blackfriars Playhouse debut with this King Lear. His nine actors were a mix of veterans and newcomers to the American Shakespeare Center. The costumes by Marie Lupia set the play in a mid-20th century rural Britain aesthete: sweaters, tweed jackets, knit caps, and quilted coats. Lear wore a black overcoat over dress gray pants, even when hunting with his 100 knights. His daughters' clothes reflected their personalities: eldest Goneril (Leah Gabriel) in gray double-breasted sweater and black slacks; middle-daughter Regan (Raven Lorraine) in trend-setting black-and-white checked pants and loose mauve blouse; and youngest Cordelia (Charlene Hong White) in a schoolgirl dress. All three wore a gold band cornet.

Lear was a prehistoric British king, and the play's timeless themes inspire many different settings among the couple dozen stage and film productions of King Lear I've seen. Barnes' choice is one of the most suitably Shakespearean, evoking a traditional British landscape of lore but recent enough to keep relevant the play's theme of crushed honesty leading to a society's disintegration. Barnes and company also produced one of the best storms on the heath I've ever been in: a near-constant roll of timpani in an upstairs control room behind the audience provided the thunder, actors vocalizing backstage created the wind, and Iannone's Lear portrayed the storm's intensity through the intensity of her performance. "BLOOOOOWWW, WINDS, AND CRACK YOUR CHEEKS!" she roared with such force you could visualize downpouring rain pelting her face.

Iannone is a relative newcomer to the Blackfriars stage but already has affixed herself as a favorite among the playhouse's regulars. Having seen her deliver remarkably singular readings of several Shakespeare characters, I was determined to somehow work her Lear into my schedule. She exceeded my expectations because, in addition to mastering the character's subtle traits, the diminutive Iannone gave Lear a prevailing, powerful virility even after he slips into senility.

She established Lear's authority from his first lines, announcing his intention to retire and turn management of the realm over to his daughters. He demands that they earn their allotments of the kingdom by describing how much they love him; it's a game to Lear, but his ego requires capitulation. A satisfied grin creeped onto Iannone's stern countenance as her Lear soaked in Goneril and Regan stating in excess their love for him. This signals the world of hurt awaiting Cordelia, whose asides have told us she won't play the game. When Lear asked her, "What can you say to draw a third more opulent [portion of the kingdom] than your sisters?" Cordelia’s “Nothing, my lord,” instantly garnered a searing Lear glare that could pass right through White and vaporize all audience members behind her. Iannone delivered Lear's subsequent "Better thou hadst not been born than not to have pleased me better" not as a lamenting complaint but as a threat indicating Lear is envisioning something worse than death for Cordelia. She's lucky the outcome was only her father disowning her.

The Earl of Kent (Blake Henri, left), who has been banished by King Lear and returns to the stage disguised as a rough-hewn serving man, presents himself to Lear (Angela Iannone) whereupon the king grills him on his skills in the American Shakespeare Center production of William Shakespeare's King Lear at the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia. Photo by Alania Shefelton.

Authority is a key theme of Lear's story. Lear banishes the Earl of Kent (Blake Henri) for interceding on Cordelia's behalf, but the loyal earl returns in disguise to serve as one of Lear's knights. Seeking employment with the king, the disguised Kent speaks one of my favorite lines in Shakespeare (one I often applied to my Air Force colonel wife): "You have that in your countenance which I would fain call master."

"What's that?" Lear asks.

"Authority," Kent replies.

Later in the play, after declining into a delusional state of dementia, Lear redefines what he always considered authority. "Thou hast seen a farmer's dog bark at a beggar? And the creature run from the cur? There thou mightst behold the great image of authority: a dog's obeyed in office." Lear has come to learn that authority is not what's in his countenance but from his social rank, which he's lost though he still considers himself "every inch a king." It's this form of authority, the office of king, that Lear's elder daughters would usurp and eventually wield over him. "Pray you, let's hit together," Goneril says to Regan about Lear's order for them to manage his 100 knights while he alternates residence between the two daughters. "If our father carry authority with such dispositions as he bears, this last surrender of his will but offend us." Regan readily concurs.

Lear's three daughters, in their individual ways, clearly inherited Lear's behavioral genes in this production. Gabriel's Goneril was dispassionately stoic, White's Cordelia was recklessly stubborn, and Lorraine's Regan was impetuously cruel. When the Earl of Gloucester (Blackfriars veteran Christopher Seiler), described Regan's "fiery quality" and how "unremovable and fixed she is in her own course," Iannone's Lear recognized himself in the description. This reading, however, worked only because the person Gloucester was describing in the original text was the Duke of Cornwall, Regan's husband, cut from this production. With no Cornwall, this production lets Regan go even beyond her father's impetuosity by gouging out Gloucester's eyes all by herself. Notably, gouging out Gloucester's eyes was Goneril's idea, and, with no Gloucester to take up the idea, this becomes another in a throughline of Regan's constant attempts to outdo her older sister.

Barnes and his cast discovered so many textual details and throughlines that I felt I was seeing and, more importantly, hearing these characters for the first time. This includes my favorite character in the Shakespeare canon, Kent, whom Henri played with exacting comprehension. When meeting the insane beggar Poor Tom (the Earl of Gloucester's disguised son, Edgar, played by Rasell Holt), Lear, shocked at Tom's destitute state, exclaims, "Didst thou give all to thy two daughters? And art thou come to this?" This always inspires audience laughter, which continued in this playing as Kent tells Lear, "He hath no daughters, sir." The ultimate punchline comes next with Lear's reply: "Death, traitor! Nothing could have subdued nature to such a lowness but his unkind daughters." Iannone, however, cut short the laughter by turning violently toward Kent as she shouted "Death, traitor!" giving Kent a flashback to the first scene when Lear with poised sword banished him. Iannone's Lear reacted to Kent's reaction, perhaps recognizing Kent, who quickly turned and pulled his jacket hood over his head, whereupon Iannone completed Lear's line about unkind daughters.

Another such connection I've never noticed before involves Poor Tom's apparel. When the blinded Gloucester comes upon his disguised son, Gloucester dictates that the Bedlam beggar guide him to the cliffs of Dover. Gloucester asks the old man attending him to "bring some covering for this naked soul." "I'll bring him the best 'pparel that I have," the servant says. Next time we see Edgar, Holt was wearing a grimy, ripped tank t-shirt. As Gloucester noted that Poor Tom seemed to be speaking "In better phrase and matter than thou didst," Edgar replies, "You're much deceived: In nothing am I changed but in my garments." Holt disgustedly fingered his tattered t-shirt, what the provider called his "best apparel," which was more shabby than what he had been wearing on the heath.

King Lear (Angela Iannone, front right) seeks council from Edgar disguised as Poor Tom (Rasell Holt, front) as the Fool (Summer England, kneeling), Edgar's father the Earl of Gloucester (Crhistopher Seiler, standing center), and the disguised Earl of Kent (Blake Henri) watch in the American Shakespeare Center's production of WIlliam Shakespear's King Lear at the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia. Photo by Alania Shefelton.

Other keen throughputs in this staging were less textual and more singular observations of the characters Shakespeare created. When Lear, Kent, and the Fool came upon Poor Tom in the hovel, Edgar reacted with knife in hand and Kent quickly disarmed him. Thereupon, Edgar recognized the king and went into his Poor Tom act. When Gloucester appeared, Kent noted Poor Tom's reaction to Edgar's father. When Kent escorts Lear out of the hovel to flee to Dover as his daughters plan to kill their father, Kent paused to return Poor Tom his knife, acknowledging in his expression that he knows him to be Edgar. This carries visual resonance when they meet again at the end of the play.

Barnes's other textual imposition was one I'd never appreciated: including Lear's Fool in the opening scene. Shakespeare didn't, whether for thematic or logistic reasons (many scholars believe the same actor played both Cordelia and the Fool), and that heightens the effect of the "absent Fool" suddenly appearing in the play's third scene. Inserting the Fool in the opening act worked here because of the emotional gravitas Summer England imbued in the Fool while maintaining the character's comic essence. As Lear railed at Cordelia, the princess sought comfort and protection from the Fool. In no other production of King Lear can I imagine Lear behaving toward his daughter that way without the Fool comically undermining him. But Iannone playing Lear as an angry grizzly bear with a Komodo dragon's bite, even the Fool stayed out of his range. In later scenes, as the witty Fool accompanies the king, England gave the Fool's riddling repartee a pissed-off edge, her anger at Lear energizing her delivery to make sure her meaning struck home.

This play is incredibly rich in the characters Shakespeare has drawn, including servants who speak eight lines at most. This tight ensemble featured individual performances that increased my appreciation of these characters fourfold. Henri enriched Kent with keen clarity of every single syllable in every line. Holt, whether as Edgar or Poor Tom, likewise made every word count, including the Bedlam beggar's gibberish. Edgar's villainous bastard brother, Edmund, got a refreshingly intelligent presentation in the casual reading Joe Mucciolo gave the part—casual until the still-disguised Edgar called him out as a traitor. Mucciolo then fully unleashed his Edmund's intense resentment at being disenfranchised for the sole reason of being the product of his father's infidelity.

Another such transition came when England's Fool finally gave in to the pity she ultimately felt toward her master's foolishness and subsequent abuse at the hands of his daughters. "If thou wert my fool, nuncle, I'd have thee beaten for being old before thy time." "How's that?" Lear queries, Iannone's reading more weary than wary. "Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise," the Fool replies. That got to Iannone's Lear, who wept in urging "O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven. Keep me in temper: I would not be mad!" Iannone still had a lot of rage for her Lear to exhibit, but she also authentically fleshed out the king's dive into dementia. Her scene with the blinded Gloucester drew tears among the audience along with Gloucester and Edgar. Iannone's brilliantly reading of Lear awakening during his reunion with Cordelia captured the confused frustration among people coping with the realities—and unrealities—of dementia that Shakespeare so accurately portrays.

Doubling roles is a mission tradition at the Blackfriars, so I'm surprised that Barnes chose to excise France and Burgundy vying for Cordelia's hand in marriage in the opening scene. Without France making Cordelia his queen, where does she go and build an army in the interim? More consequential was disposing of the two husband dukes, Albany and Cornwall. Their absence seriously altered the dynamics of the love rivalry between Goneril and Regan as Cornwall's death while blinding Gloucester opened Regan's way to legally bedding Edmund. Goneril is trapped in a loveless marriage with Albany, a man she considers a "milk-livered man." Goneril conspiring with Edmund to kill Albany and marry her comprises one of two counts of conspiracy with which Edmund is charged.

ASIDE: Cordelia and the Fool

I am not a Shakespearean scholar. I state that clearly in my mission statement for Shakespeareances.com (“A Message for Snobs Only”). Nevertheless, people often call me a Shakespearean scholar, including actors, directors, a dramaturg, and a bona fide Shakespearean scholar. That “bona fide” is what I lack: an academic record of deep-dive research into William Shakespeare, his works, his contemporaries, and his times. At most, I am a professional audience member who has seen more than 650 Shakespearean productions.

So, it was both curious and flattering when I first met Madison L. Little after attending a production at the Folger. She told me she quoted me in her 2020 Shakespeare and Performance MLitt Thesis, “‘My Poor Fool is Hanged’: The Thematic Doubling of the Fool and Cordelia,” for Mary Baldwin University’s Shakespeare in Performance graduate program. Then Little told me, “I disagreed with you.” Cool! I asked her to send it to me.

I had essentially dismissed the theory that Cordelia and the Fool were doubled because Robert Armin was famous for playing Shakespeare’s fools, of which the one in King Lear is right up his ally. Cordelia, however, was a young woman and a boy’s role. Or so I thought until I saw the Globe Theatre’s all-male Twelfth Night on Broadway and realized that middle-aged men can be dressed and made up to look like young women in Elizabethan-costumed productions.

However, Little's specific point of disagreement with me in her thesis is the “poor fool is hanged” line that Lear speaks while holding the dead Cordelia in his arms at the end of the play. I find productions that tie that line to the Fool’s mysterious disappearance midway through the play heavy handed and tiresome. Shakespeare sometimes drops a character for plot or logistics reasons; so what?

Read that last sentence again, and you’ll pick up the tone as much as my stance that Little countered in her thesis. Little refers to my review of the 2016 Jenny Bennett-directed Blackfriars Playhouse production of King Lear and describes how I “somewhat brashly” ended my review with “Shakespeare doesn’t concern himself with what happened to the Fool, so why should Bennett? Amen!” I do sound arrogant there, don’t I? Little also writes that I missed some pertinently powerful stage business performed by Chris Johnston, who played the Fool but was doubling as a servant in the final scene. I don’t doubt Johnston made such a gesture when Lear spoke the line because Blackfriars Playhouse productions often play meta moments in doubling parts.

So, I humbly admit my overreach. Meanwhile, Little’s thesis strings together textual evidence and historical context to illustrate the thematic merits of doubling Cordelia and the Fool. Most pertinent, she presents a record of evidence that Armin would not have necessarily played the Fool. In fact, given Armin’s stature in the company as a principal actor (second only to Richard Burbage, who played Lear) and his particular skills in vocal characterizations, he was more likely to play Edgar, who, along with Kent, have the most stage presence in the play other than Lear. Edgar disguises himself as Poor Tom and pretends to be a couple of characters, disguised only by his voice as he leads his blinded father around Dover. That's four different vocal roles.

A boy playing both Cordelia and the Fool? Sure, I'll give way to Little's argument. In exchange, she has provided me the delight of imagining Armin playing Edgar the next time I read the play. —EMSo much for plot impact. The thematic impact of cutting Albany was losing his role as counterpoint to Cornwall, Goneril, and Regan as a figure of authority. "Where I could not be honest, I never yet was valiant," he says upon accusing Edmund of treason based on Goneril's intercepted letter to Edmund. Albany's role in reasserting a state of honesty for the realm is essential. When by rank he is next in line after the king and his three daughters are all dead, he offers the throne instead to Kent and Edgar because of their experiences in caring for the king. Kent declines, determined to follow his master in death. Edgar may or may not accept the scepter. In the First Folio text, he speaks the play's four-line dramatic and thematic conclusion:

The weight of this sad times we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most: we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

In the Quarto version, Albany speaks those lies and Edgar is silent.

Honesty is the driving theme of King Lear and its concluding principle. The word honest and its derivations appear 10 times in the play. Kent, even in disguise, and Albany along with Cordelia and the Fool are living definitions of the word in a society that suffers annihilation as a results of rampant dishonesty—a lesson for all societies, including ours. In the play's second scene when Gloucester proclaims to Edmund how "the noble and true-hearted Kent banished! His offence, honesty!" the Blackfriars audience responded with current-events-inspired laughter.

The late, great Shakespearean actor John Geilgud was asked the key to playing King Lear. He replied, "Make sure you have a light Cordelia." What if your King Lear is perhaps the lightest actor on the stage? Iannone unleashed Lear's howling that announces the arrival of Cordelia's corpse, but Henri's Kent fittingly took up the duty of carrying Cordelia on stage. There followed one of the most devastating performances of this devastating scene I've seen. “She’s gone forever,” Lear says, Iannone presenting a shattered father trying to reckon with the emotions roiling through him. “I know when one is dead and when one lives," Iannone's Lear continues as if contemplating the incomprehensible: "She’s dead as earth.” After Lear thinks Cordelia may still be alive and tries to prove it, he concludes, “No, no, no life!” After shifting from confusion to bitterness—“Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, and thou no breath at all?"—Iannone's Lear slid into a nihilistic state. "Thou’lt come no more, never, never, never, never, never…” her sequence of nevers fading into evermore.

As early as the intermission, I saw several older patrons dabbing back tears. In this final scene, sobs were audible in the playhouse. The teen-age girl next to me gasped when Kent carried Cordelia's body on stage and remained agape throughout the rest of the scene, sharing in Lear's shock that Cordelia could end up dead. This scene almost always gets me, but this is the first time I've seen the play since my wife's Alzheimer's has entered its seventh and final stage, so I was feeling the moment viscerally and wiping at my own tears. Thus was the emotional depth that this ensemble took us to, and the full spectrum of King Lear that Iannone mastered.

An actor, a cast, and a company triumph well worth celebrating.

Eric Minton
May 26, 2025

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