E-Mail This Article to a Friend Legends King Lear and Vita & Virginia from Shakespeare & Company BY CAROLYN CLAY
	King Lear By William Shakespeare. Directed by Tina Packer. Set by Kris Stone. Costumes by Arthur Oliver. Lighting by Matthew E. Adelson. Sound by Jason Fitzgerald and Dan Cooper. Fight choreography by Michael F. Toomey. Music by Fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center, conducted by Stefan Asbury. With John Douglas Thompson, Malcolm Ingram, Johnny Lee Davenport, Ariel Bock, Daniel J. Sherman, Elizabeth Aspenlieder, Mark Saturno, Kristin Wold, Jonathan Epstein, Kevin G. Coleman, Lon Bull, Michael F. Toomey, Jason Asprey, and Mel Cobb. Presented by Shakespeare & Company in its Founders’ Theatre, in repertory through August 30. Vita & Virginia By Eileen Atkins, adapted from the correspondence between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. Directed by Dan McCleary. Set by Chastity Collins. Costumes by Jennifer Halpern. Lighting by Nathan Towne-Smith. Sound by Jason Fitzgerald. With Tod Randolph and Catherine Taylor-Williams. Presented by Shakespeare & Company in its Spring Lawn Theatre, in

LENOX: In Vita & Virginia, as presented in Shakespeare & Company’s parlor theater at Spring Lawn mansion, Vita Sackville-West describes her adventures as the wife of a diplomat posted to Persia, which include riding a train that’s on fire and essaying a mountain. Up the street in the Founders’ Theatre, Shakespeare & Company too is scaling a peak: the Bard’s own Everest, King Lear, into which S&C sinks its climbing shoes for the first time, the expedition led by artistic director Tina Packer and leading actor Jonathan Epstein. The irony is that the fortysomething Epstein proves almost too fit for the job, his Lear less an old tyrant breaking against the shoals of madness and mortality than a rugged guy perplexed to discover he’s retired too early. Unusually subdued for a Lear, Epstein plays the king as a man trying to hold onto his sanity by holding in his rage. He is a mighty actor wrestling here with a mighty role, but the bout feels less over than ongoing.

The production, on a newly configured thrust into the company’s adaptable Founders’ Theatre, starts vigorously and well, the white-wigged Epstein presenting a king authoritative, formidable, and entirely on his toes despite a small limp. Pausing in the midst of a formal entrance parade, the figurative heart of white-clad court and family, he stops to give the Earl of Gloucester’s bastard son the once-over, chuckles indulgently, and moves on. But for Lear, illegitimacy is one thing; failure to fawn is another. And when favored child Cordelia (Kristin Wold) refuses to heave her heart into her mouth and spew a valentine to Daddy, the king greets her frankness at first with a nervous laugh, then with near-tearful incredulity. No dodderer, he recovers himself with a flourish, first cleaving a map of the kingdom in two, then bisecting his coronet with his sword. There will be no tripartite government here.

The production continues to bristle with the athletic re-entrance of John Douglas Thompson’s Edmund, the aforementioned bastard, who spits out the word "legitimate" as if separating it too with the king’s sword, turning the last syllable into a synonym for a mixed-breed dog. Thompson’s performance throughout is villainy undertaken with the charismatic relish of Richard III — and enough sex appeal to make it no wonder that Goneril (Ariel Bock) and Regan (Elizabeth Aspenlieder) come to cat-fight over him rather than over who gets which end of Sussex.

Packer is interested in the buoyant atrocity of the play’s malefactors, who include Edmund, "serpent’s tooth" daughters Goneril and Regan, and Regan’s husband, the Duke of Cornwall (Mark Saturno). The scene in which the latter two carry out their brute revenge on Gloucester, whom they discover in possession of letters detailing the return of Cordelia to re-establish her mistreated father on the throne, takes on the jarring, lurid cruelty of a snuff film. The couple kiss deeply and Regan whips off her diaphanous shawl to plant her strapless self in Gloucester’s lap before the pair pull the old earl’s eyes out, then stomp them into the stage floor. Saturno’s sadistic Cornwall seems to be getting off even after he’s fatally stabbed!

But the real meat of King Lear, as Packer understands, is existential, not sensational. Warning the audience of the production’s length at the onset of the final preview (which this reviewer attended), she explained that you "can’t do the beginning and ending of the world in less than three hours." (Indeed, it takes three and a half.) Her program notes describe the play as a sort of extreme exercise in self-discovery, a thing that occurs only when one has been reduced to the bare "nothing" that gets Cordelia into hot water in the first scene. Still, the key scenes on the heath and in the hovel, with both Lear and his Fool depressed, go a bit limp, despite Jason Asprey’s twitching, sinewy turn as Gloucester’s good son, Edgar, who’s disguised as the "poor, bare, forked animal" Mad Tom. (Adding to the stormy atmosphere are the musical contributions of the Tanglewood Music Center composing fellows, which snake through the production, including intermission, providing an undercurrent of dissonant fanfare, metallic plinking, and what sound like muted bursts of Bernstein.)

That said, the relationship of Epstein’s bi-polar Lear to Kevin G. Coleman’s morose Fool is touching. As Lear’s prized wits begin to go, he sometimes slides out of concentration on events around him to trade loving, laughing whacks of a spongy bat with the Fool, who though long in the tooth for a "boy" walks mostly on his knees, clinging to his royal protector. Epstein’s Lear, apparently a man used to tender parenting, seems so accustomed to this as hardly to notice. Once the Fool has disappeared from the play in Shakespeare’s third act, Lear takes on the prankster/truthsayer’s cockscomb, wearing it to Dover like a corsage.

And at Dover, where the beatifically addled, newly wise Lear is reunited with blinded failed suicide Gloucester (in Johnny Lee Davenport a figure grizzled but imposing, far from his dotage), the production regains its propulsion. Looking a bit like Robinson Crusoe in his billowing white shirt and torn pants, Epstein’s Lear, having survived the heath and seen the humbling truth of his humanity, radiates a whimsical purity here. "Aye, every inch a king," he says, with irony, of himself. "When I do stare, see how the subject quakes," he continues, addressing his own trembling hand.

Similarly, Lear’s reunion with Cordelia, bolstered by the music of the Tanglewood Fellows, is full of mystery reminiscent of the Bard’s late romances. White-gowned, barefoot, and pushed on in a wheelchair, Epstein’s king at last seems frail, though he tries, stiffly, to kneel before his wronged daughter, rising to stroke her hair, face, chest, with tentative, childlike eagerness. Who could fail to be touched by this scene, which is surely among the most heartbreaking in drama, no matter how many times one experiences it?

Packer’s production, in Shakespeare & Company’s Bare Bard tradition, is simple; there’s little set beyond a clinking bamboo curtain. Yet there are excesses, and not just in the sexually charged eye-gouging scene (though Aspenlieder’s exultantly carnal Regan contrasts with Bock’s harsh Goneril). The duel between the good and evil brothers Gloucester is charged, and Edmund’s death scene, played with a knife extruding from his chest, is wincingly effective. But do we need a charnel wagon for the dead ménage à trois? At least Lear dies with dignity, swanning against the breast of Malcolm Ingram’s solid Kent as the latter famously counsels that "He hates him/That would upon the rack of this tough world/Stretch him out longer."

Virginia Woolf dies too, slipping behind a translucent banner bearing the image of a river, in Vita & Virginia, the theater piece English writer/actress Eileen Atkins cobbled out of the correspondence between Woolf and fellow writer and "pronounced Sapphist" Vita Sackville-West, from their 1922 meeting to Woolf’s 1941 suicide. The fascinating if hardly dramatic work was first performed in 1994 by Atkins (who had already adapted and performed A Room of One’s Own) and Vanessa Redgrave. At S&C, under the direction of Dan McCleary, the genteel foray into literary lesbianism is undertaken by Tod Randolph, who keenly personated Woolf in the troupe’s 1999 A Room of One’s Own, and a bobbed Catherine Taylor-Williams, looking as if she’d just stepped out of the 1920s.

Woolf and Sackville-West were a clear case of "opposites attract," the one a frumpy genius debilitated by depression, the other a stylishly mannish aristocrat as remembered for her gardening tomes as for her novels (The Edwardians) and poetry ("The Land"). At the time they were introduced, though, Sackville-West — on whom Woolf modeled the time-traveling, gender-hopping protagonist of Orlando — was the more popular writer and notorious personality. In the theater piece, Woolf describes Sackville-West as "florid" and "parakeet-colored." Sackville-West notes that Woolf "dresses quite atrociously."

Randolph is indeed a bit dowdy, her hair shorn "short as a partridge’s rump" in act two. And except when she turns flouncy or playful (bad, though deliberate, choices), her character is wry and contained, occasionally offering up keys to her magical stream-of-consciousness prose, which she characterizes as coming to her as rhythms rather than as words. Taylor-Williams, on the other hand, is flamboyantly, coltishly seductive, her every pronouncement dripping wit or provocation. The heightened descriptions of travel adventures in Persia, flung across the parlor theater to Woolf’s confining easy chair at Rodmell, are a show in themselves.

The play includes, of course, Sackville-West’s epistolary declaration that "I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia." Yet based as it is on proper if intimate correspondence, this is hardly a lesbian love story. Except for Sackville-West’s snaky slide down a chaise longue and a few kisses that leave Woolf looking quizzical, there’s little physical contact between the women (though there are displays of pique by Woolf regarding Sackville-West’s other conquests). More interesting is the literary conversation and the glimpse of an English aristocracy enduring the blitzkrieg of early World War I.

What’s not surprising, given the faithful adherence to their letters, is that Vita & Virginia is less a play than a literate, speedy trip through a relationship, one participant in which happens to be among the most exquisite minds of the 20th-century Modernists. But the piece, given some movement by McCleary, fits nicely into the airy Spring Lawn manse. Seeing it there is less like attending the theater than like poking through Isabella’s trinkets at the Gardner Museum.