The Passion(s) of King Lear at The New Spruce Theater

For my first post-COVID live theater experience (i.e. my first since 2019), this production (directed by Nicole Ricciardi) was an incredible three hours, twenty minutes. The stage, built around seven towering, eponymous pine trees; the simple, stone-stepped amphitheater; a ruined old farm house with collapsed roof adjacent to the theater; the sun slowly setting behind the trees, turning the evening from oppressively hot to pleasantly cool, even punctuated with drizzle during the final scene, right as Lear moved on to stage with Cordelia’s body; and all of it unfolding as a hurricane bore down on our location: all of it made it so that someone could’ve come out on stage and read the phone book for three hours and it would’ve been better and more welcomed than how I had spent most evenings for the past two years.

But to review and not just bask, I will give both short and long evaluations. The short is simply that Christopher Lloyd as Lear was the weakest performance in an otherwise quite strong ensemble. But that sets me up to begin a longer review by noting that each time I consider a performance of King Lear (this is the sixth I’ve seen and reviewed), I spend only a small, sometimes even insignificant, part of the review on the titular character and the actor’s portrayal of him (sometimes her). The success – or more generally, and perhaps more interestingly, the effect – of the play depends on an astonishingly complex combination of factors…