The midwestern theatre doesn't tend to produce directorial auteurs. Okay, I know reviews that begin with grandly general pronouncements are a little gaggy but I sorta think I'm onto something here.
It would be pretty weird if we found out that Ivo Van Hove was from downstate Illinois, or that Peter Sellars' childhood was spent in the school districts of Hennepin County. Sure, Joanne Akalitis may have been born in Chicago, but you wouldn't say her artistic voice exactly flourished in the Land of Lincoln.
I bring this up by way of another generalization. In the contents of this blog, I often find myself saying things like "this production favors clarity of Shakespearean communication over radical new interpretation" (I usually phrase it just that clunkily). I know I've had such a thought at places like the Guthrie, American Players Theatre, the Stratford Festival, Michigan Shakespeare, Illinois Shakespeare, the Milwaukee Rep, etc etc etc. Obviously this is a geographical byproduct of an individual's attendance biases, but you're reading these words for some reason.
Of course you'll get into arguments over a subject like this: "why is Sean Graney an auteur but not Barbara Gaines? where does Michelle Hensley land? why is Robert Falls an auteur when he's directing Shakespeare but not Rebecca Gilman*? is David Cromer my personal friend???" But so it goes as Billy Pilgrim said. My point here is that Tim Ocel's production of King Lear at American Players Theatre in Spring Green, WI is just such a piece of evidence: fluid, clear, unflashy, if ultimately non-devastating.
Really, the ideal version of King Lear should not be sad, but heartbreaking on a debilitating level. To that specific end, Ocel's production is a failure, but that's a tough bar to clear. The production is a lean and stable rendition of Shakespeare’s Everest, that leaves you reasonably sad, if still able to feed and bathe yourself.
If you were diagnosing particular rhetorical strategies that make the APT actors easy to understand when speaking Shakespeare's language, you could do worse than to say they really hit their verbs (big deal in Shakespeare, verbs). Brian Mani's Lear is in fact "a man more sinned against than sinning"; a foolish father, but not a cruel one. His choice to divide his kingdom among his three daughters, and the tumult that ensues, does in Mani's case come from a sturdy, stalwart man of state, whose mental and physical faculties diminish until he is paradoxically allowed an extra dose of sanity once he has as they say in Shakespeare "gone mad."
The rest of the ensemble is uniformly unoffensive, and the choice to have Regan (Jessica Ko) and Cornwall (Ronald Román-Meléndez) be sexually excited by the blinding of Gloucester (an understated James DeVita) is a useful example that in this production their ultimate corruption stems from power and its sadism, rather than inherent personal evil. The vulnerability La Shawn Banks summons as Kent in realizing his service to Lear, even after his patron's death, is not yet over, and he has a spectral "journey" to which he "must not say no" is genuinely moving. Josh Krause does noble service as Lear's fool, attempting to forge a performative arc in a character that so staunchly resists clinical text analysis. And I'd love to see Sam Luis Massaro in more starring roles, as the moral earnestness he brings to Lear's Gentleman counts as (the generous kind of) scene-stealing.
Jeb Burris's fight direction is clunky and automated (knife fights shouldn't have parries), but other than that the production's visual components serviceably allow the language to take front-and-center in the way you expect to hear in Spring Green. Ocel's no-frills aesthetic is best exemplified in the elegant simplicity of the storm scene, where he and sound designer Gregg Coffin show admirable restraint in not attempting to shout down Shakespeare's text with ambient downpour: they let Mani and his Lear ask for the storm, and refuse to drown the words with reverb.
At its best, Ocel and his actors let you sit in immediate proximity to the language. In the scene when the mad Lear meets the blinded Gloucester, Lear tells his old friend:
"If thou wilt weep my fortunes, take my eyes.
I know thee well enough; thy name is Gloucester.
Thou must be patient. We came crying hither;
Thou know’st the first time that we smell the air
We wawl and cry. I will preach to thee. Mark...
When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools.—This’ a good block."
Maybe it's trite but the words really do catch your soul. Hearing them spoken clearly in the natural amphitheater up the hill at APT on a beautiful August night is a pleasure unto itself. Maybe the Midwestern audience has endured too many winters to demand a continental style of high-concept directing. Perhaps that’s the reason we seem to value clarity over flash.
*It's called "the public domain"
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