“Sunshine and rain at once”: New York Classical Theatre presents King Lear

In a number of Shakespeare’s plays, characters faced with insurmountable problems escape into what Northrop Frye termed the “green world”: often a forest, always a place of both confusion and possibility. Arden in As You Like It and the fairy-filled woods outside of Athens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are perhaps the clearest examples. But green worlds show up everywhere when you start to look for them: Belmont in The Merchant of Venice, Bohemia in The Winter’s Tale, Prospero’s island. Sometimes the green world is filled with danger and discomfort: Lear’s rain-battered heath is a kind of green world. To spend time in the green world is to change, at least for a little while but just possibly forever. To return home from it is to re-enter the very structures—familial, political, social—that precipitated the need for escape, but with impasses relaxed and energies renewed. The green world restructures the normal world, because it alters the people who pass through it.

Theater can do that too, at least in a small way. The analogy of enchanted forest to the magic circle that binds actors and audience becomes nearly irresistible when a production happens to be outdoors, in a space that is quite literally green. In outdoor Shakespeare performances, a stretch of lawn or a stand of trees does double duty as Arden or Bohemia or Lear’s heath, because it serves as a set. But that park also does the same work as Arden or Bohemia or Lear’s heath, lifting the audience…