There are a few eternal truths in life. One is that it is always good to see a William Shakespeare play. When we have long left behind this planet and moved on to the next, Shakespeare will still be staged within our geospheres and space stations. Just as the early American pioneers — setting off westward into what was, to them, effectively a new planet — always included inside their covered carriages at least two books: the Bible and the Bard’s collected works. For there is no playwright better able to provide us with such a perfectly vexing, probing and still enjoyable picture of ourselves than him, and thus it is always enriching to spend a few hours in his world.
The Oakland Theater Project is providing you one such opportunity with its new production of “King Lear,” running from Sept. 26 to Oct. 11, at a pay-what-you-can scale from 10 to 40 dollars. I recommend you go see it, but I have a few warnings.
The primary one is to familiarize yourself with the story before attending. This is not a production to go to if you wish to see the play in its unadulterated glory. In exchange for weakened narrative cohesion, director Michael Socrates Moran can emphasize strong individual performance and creative stage design instead.
Set designer Sam Fehr fits the entire three-hour work into a single setting: a Zen garden. In the center of the stage lies a square sand pit, in the center of that, a raised black circle that parallels the eclipse whose appearance in the skies above Britain presages the tragic events of the play. This bare environment is a productive constraint whose problems lead to interesting solutions, most of which utilize a large projected screen that takes up the entirety of the stage’s back wall.
In addition to an ever-present eclipse, the screen occasionally displays the output of a handheld camera that’s been incorporated into the play — the most interesting innovation. This allows Moran to block scenes in ways normally off-limits. During the Earl of Gloucester’s blinding, he is bound to a chair facing away from us and towards the camera, the brutality filmed like a hostage-ransom video. As he squirms in the chair, we see ourselves, the audience, in his background, staring mutely: complicit observers to a horrid crime.
The Earl, played by David Sinaiko, and his son Edgar, played by Tyler Aguallo, provide the play’s most compelling performances. Aguallo gets to flex his dramaturgical muscles by transforming live on stage from Edgar to Poor Tom, and he does so impressively. His body, caked in a green mud and hunched over animalistically, compels wordlessly.
Paul Dresher’s name is attached to an intriguing byline, under the author and director credit, that starts with “music composed by” — not usually seen on Shakespeare playbills. What this refers to, I learned, was a drone-like soundtrack played on a sort of advanced electronic xylophone, accompanied by wordless singing.
In general, what these creative additions don’t contribute to is a seamless understanding of the progress of the story. Compounding this difficulty is the tendency for certain actors to sometimes pronounce their lines a bit too “trippingly on the tongue,” to quote Hamlet’s speech to the players. The challenge for great actors playing emotional roles is, as Hamlet tells us, to fully express “the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, / the whirlwind of passion,” while still begetting “a temperance that may give it smoothness.” In short: to yell and yell while still keeping each word distinguishable from the next.
The loss of these narrative-supporting structures is the cost for making alterations. When dragging the play into a new time and a new place, certain elements get lost on the journey. But these novel alterations are, of course, the kindling which keeps a play that’s been burning steadily for some 400 years, still burning. You should go see the Oakland Theater Project’s newest version of one of our species’ great traditions, participate in the building of one more link in this long chain. Only time will tell how different “King Lear” on Mars will look.