The Alchemist’s “King Lear” a crowning achievement

The Alchemist Theatre’s King Lear begins without any fanfare, lights shifting just enough to draw your eyes as actors walk onstage, mid-conversation. It’s a jarring way to begin. More so when you know Lear deserves fanfare, as one of Shakespeare’s greatest (some would say the greatest) tragedies.

Once you get settled in, it makes sense. Director Leda Hoffmann and her Alchemist team have calibrated a Lear where every plot development feels realistic and instinctual, and the play’s characters ­– easily dividable into white hats and black hats, if you’re so inclined – each have motivations and personalities that feel human, not blindly gallant nor needlessly wicked nor simply mad without reason.

The result? No less than a production of a centuries-old play that somehow manages to make each and every plot development seem fresh and new, by a cast whose performance won’t be forgotten anytime soon. In short: King Lear may be a tragedy, but this production is a triumphant success for the Alchemist.

At its simplest, King Lear is a story of an aging ruler (Bo Johnson) who makes an impetuous, fateful mistake. In the play’s first moments, he assembles his court to divide his empire among his three daughters. When his youngest and most devoted, Cordelia (Grace DeWolff) chooses not to over-flatter her father in the manner of her elder sisters, Lear takes the prudence as pride and banishes her, putting himself in the hands of caretakers who will ultimately wrestle control of the kingdom away and plunge the realm into war.

It’s easy enough to make such a scenario into a simple tale of how good people fall prey to evil ones, or even how an aging, senile man can be taken advantage of by the unscrupulous and covetous people he trusts. What’s harder is to make Lear’s traditional villains – the sisters Goneril (Libby Amato) and Regan (Anna Figlesthaler), and Edmund (Matt Wickey), the bastard son of Lear’s ally Gloucester (Michael Pocaro) – actual human beings, with flaws and virtues both.

Goneril and Regan are exactly as sycophantic and cunning as they should be, but Amato and Figlesthaler never let that impulse feel more like malevolence than self-preservation. In the climactic scene where they tag-team their wandering father, rejected from both their courts for trying to assert his authority, they muster up the requisite, heartbreaking cruelty required, but something else as well: righteous fury, the logical response to the years of abuse their father has bestowed upon them in his turn. A hard combination to balance, but Amato and Figlesthaler are a duo with the skill to do it perfectly.

Wickey caught my attention for what I originally thought was the wrong reason: In the first scene, before Lear walks on stage, he drifts behind his father with a dull, deer-in-the-headlights expression strongly at odds with the Machiavellian schemer I’ve always read Edmund as. But rather than begin the play as smart as he ends, Wickey’s Edmund grows in cunning alongside his fortunes, giving us a fascinating starting point (a monologue about his base heritage that comes off especially well as the plaintive regrets of a neglected son) and a near-antiheroic character arc that almost had me rooting for him.

To delve into the admirable performances by the remainder of the cast would take paragraphs and pages, but I’ll take a moment for two that knocked my socks off. First, the obvious: Bo Johnson’s Lear. It’d be beyond foolish to perform King Lear without an actor able to handle the extremes of the part, but to think Johnson is just talented enough to run down a Lear-checklist is to be flat-out wrong. He plays Lear with a calculated inconstancy that ebbs and flows like the tide, and whether the “mad king” is angry or insane is a matter of a coin flip. His rages are captivating, first because they come with an authoritarian edge that draws every eye, then because they come with that same edge but a feebleness that neuters then. When he finally is let loose into madness, Johnson turns the role the other way, giving every insane pronouncement and action a buried, compelling purpose that reminds us the man beneath is not quite lost. Until he is.

It’s wonderful, but no surprise, that Lear’s actor is so magnificent to watch. Tim Linn (as Edgar, Gloucester’s other son) surprises. Not because we expect little from him – in his short early appearances, he seems at the same level as the rest of the cast – but because we legitimately do not expect the physicality he suddenly reveals partway through the first half, when he disguises himself as a beggar to avoid the persecution his half-brother has machinated. But “disguises” isn’t the right word. Try “becomes,” for Linn’s “poor Tom” is a twitching, gravel-voiced, monkey-jointed, mud-smeared other being, not just Edgar in rags, and Linn’s ability to seamlessly shift between the two personas was an unanticipated, impressive showing.

I’ve made much of Lear’s acting, but this production’s behind-the-scenes work was as important, if not more. Perhaps the most significant element to its success was the decision to abridge a great deal of the play, trimming it to a manageable 130 minutes. Many of those were likely for practical concerns – character reduction, for one, an important necessity since no roles are double-cast – but the overall effect is to give Lear a noticeably modern pacing that suits the Alchemist aesthetic well.

And this production would be nowhere near as good without the sharpest set design I’ve seen in months: a collection of inter-joined, web-like, weathered wooden posts that create walls, windows, halls, hovels, seats, trees, stocks and, most importantly, a second stage behind the main action used brilliantly. That clever concept (I believe the creation of Alchemist owner and producer Aaron Kopec, but I could be mistaken) is further amplified by the elaborate light work by Jason Fassl, which gives the whole proceedings an appropriately eerie ambiance throughout.

The Alchemist Theatre’s production of King Lear runs through July 27, with shows on July 17 and 22 recently added due to demand. All performances begin at 7:30 p.m., and tickets are $20 in advance or $23 at the door.