Review: Power Slips Away, One Lear at a Time, in King Lear at La MaMa

King Lear can’t believe his ears when his daughters, having been gifted large chunks of his realm, decide to strip away his retinue of 50 knights, too: “What need you five-and-twenty, ten, or five?” the scheming Goneril (Abigail Killeen) demands. “O, reason not the need!” her unthroned father snarls back.

It’s that symbol of diminishing power, initially unbearable to Shakespeare’s fallen king, that dominates Karin Coonrod’s strange, strongly acted production of King Lear from Compagnia de’ Colombari at La MaMa. Instead of one actor playing Lear, we start with 10 Lears, all wearing matching paper crowns and stylish sand-colored knapsacks. In Coonrod’s celebrated Merchant of Venice, staged in the actual Venetian ghetto where that play takes place, she cast five diverse actors as Shylock, but there they rotated the role one at a time rather than sharing it all at once.

Here, the Lears take turns delivering the king’s lines, sometimes emphasizing a particular moment with all 10 speaking together, and they acknowledge each other, clapping one another on the back in scornful laughter or embracing in stubborn solidarity against perceived injustice.

One by one, as other characters enter, the Lears remove their crowns and assume other roles. Scene by scene, we get down to five, then three, and, eventually, after the storm, just one (Tom Nelis).

Why exactly do we need 10? O, reason not the need—this multiplicity of Lears creates an oft-energizing, surround-sound experience of immersive kingship.

For the first two-thirds of the production, the actors wander behind and throughout the audience’s bleacher seating. For some, Lear is on all four sides at once. His sense of himself as something more than just a man feels palpable when he’s echoing from all directions — his power is inescapable.

This can be disorienting, especially for the theater’s front rows, not to mention the neck workout required to keep up with the movement: when actors are discarding their crowns to change roles directly in back of you, even Lear experts can start to lose their way in the text.

The irony of this King Lear—as with Sam Gold’s unfairly maligned 2019 Broadway revival—is that the staging may well bewilder audiences unfamiliar with the play, but it is also acted, line by line, with immaculate clarity by a cast who make the verse pop.

I was rooting for Michael Potts (the charismatic standout of the 2022 revival of The Piano Lesson) to wind up the last Lear standing, but he makes for a magnificently moving Gloucester. Celeste Sena is a crisp, impassioned Cordelia in her opening rejection of Lear’s “Who-loves-me-most?” gambit. She and Nelis have a lovely reunion late in the play: when Lear promises Cordelia a peaceful future imprisoned together, pondering the world’s mysteries “as if we were God’s spies,” they whisper those last words together with conspiratorial familiarity as if revisiting a storybook he read Cordelia as a child.

While modern productions tend to toy with humanizing Cordelia’s sisters, this Goneril and Regan (Jo Mei) are delectably nasty monsters. And the playful rapport between brothers Edmund (Julian Elijah Martinez) and Edgar (Abigail C. Onwunali) when they’re first together painfully sets up Edmund’s imminent betrayal. During one of Edmund’s audience-traversing speeches, Martinez tried to grab the notebook out of my hand, a unique puncturing of theater critics’ imagined invisibility; given his persuasively amoral performance, all is forgiven.

Coonrod, however, ultimately stretches her multi-Lear vision beyond its means. The final scenes retreat to a standard proscenium staging, and, despite one rather striking closing image, there’s much less that’s special in the production’s back half. And though I thought I’d understood the point of the 10 Lears—the gradual transformation of a self-defined deity into a fallible human being—the climactic return of all 10 in Lear’s most vulnerable moment, delivering his final speech in creepy, octave-leaping unison, sent that theory right out the window.

But if the conceptual house of cards starts to wobble by the end, Coonrod’s cast remains a royal flush. Even in an ordinary production, it would be a treat to see almost any of them play King Lear.