Barely There Theatre's “To Leer at Lear" at the Black Box Theatre -- July 10 through 19.
Thursday, July 10, through Sunday, July 19
The Black Box Theatre, 1623 Fifth Avenue Moline IL
Even without benefit of a plot synopsis, you may think you know the chief inspiration for Alexander Richardson's new Barely There Theatre stage comedy To Leer at Lear, which enjoys its world premiere at Moline's Black Box Theatre July 10 through 19. It's Shakespeare's timeless tragedy King Lear, right?
Well, yes. But also no. Because as Richardson (one of the Reader's area-theatre reviewers) states during our recent interview, “The inspiration that's actually been in the back of my head as I was writing it, and that's apparent as we're rehearsing it now, is A Muppet Christmas Carol.”
Let's back up. In January of 2019, during the run of Richardson's original comedy (a work in progress) at Moline's Playcrafters Barn Theatre, the author introduced audiences to the fictitious New Dreadful Players: a collection of hapless community-theatre types who were trying very hard to produce a very bad, mishap-prone play. (It should be noted that the badness was, on Richardson's part, intentional.) That New Dreadful crew, albeit with different actors in the roles, is now back for To Leer at Leer, and this time they're taking on a very good piece of theatre – one of the best ever written.
“It's my favorite of Shakespeare's plays,” says Richardson of King Lear. “It's one of my favorite plays in general, because it's so operatic and tragic, and even the little moments of hope you get in it are immediately dashed. Something about that, and the play's characters, has always resonated with me because … . I don't know, I'm sick, I guess.”
But while Richardson has recorded a full-length audio performance of Shakespeare's master tragedy for his Barely There Theatre company (one to be released within the next few months, with this author as one of the vocal performers), he chose to approach King Lear from a different angle – a much different angle – when the Black Box venue proved available this July.
“I wanted to do something funny,” says Richardson, “because the news is so grim at the moment. I was thinking of a funny story I could tell, but also one that would give me a challenge in the telling of it. So I thought that what would be hard was if I took something really sad and tried to make it funny. And when I was thinking of stories, they don't get much sadder than King Lear. That's when I thought there was something inherently daunting and funny about the idea of trying to do it as a comedy as the first place.”
Not that, as Richardson says, the Bard's play is entirely humorless. “Because at its core,” he says, “while it is very sad, there are also some really goofy things that happen in King Lear. Things that, because they're in the context of King Lear, aren't goofy; they're tragic. But when you take a step back and think about what's actually happening … .
“Take the B plot with Gloucester and his sons Edgar and Edmund. Edmund is scheming the whole show – he's responsible for the deaths of so many people – and one of the first things he does, one of his first acts of evil, is he gets his brother Edgar exiled. He writes a fake letter and shows it to his father, and Gloucester is like, 'Well, he's banished then! I won't stand for this!' And then Edmund goes to Edgar and is like, 'Hey, dad's really mad at you,' and Edgar's like, 'Oh. Okay.' He just takes it at face value, and rather than try to talk to his dad about it, he exiles himself and disguises himself as a beggar. There's no real internal reason for it; it's just this silly thing he does.
“And over the course of King Lear,” Richardson continues, “Edgar then continues to adopt more and more disguises for no real discernible reason. He leads his father to the Cliffs of Dover, where it looks like Gloucester is going to kill himself. But rather than come back to his father, who has collapsed on the ground, as this beggar character, Edgar then adopts a second character to talk to his father. Then another character enters the scene, and rather than stay in the second character he's already in, Edgar decides to jump into a third character just to talk to this new person. And then a fourth person comes into the scene, and Edgar opts to go into yet another character who speaks in this really weird, broken-French, phonetic accent that Shakespeare wrote … Which I actually got to keep, in my version, in its entirety.
“So yes, as it's happening in King Lear, you accept it. But then when you sit back and think about it, you're like, 'Well … you really didn't need characters three and four and five there … .' It's this inherently silly aspect of this really dramatic story. So for Leer at Lear, I was like, 'If that's in the original, what other silly things are there?'”
Consequently, To Leer at Lear will find the New Dreadful Players forced (by their show's foolishly demanding producer) to stage Shakespeare's classic as an audience-friendly comedy, a job that becomes easier with the recruitment of an unlikely “leading man.” Yes, this is where A Muppet Christmas Carol comes into play.
After their original Lear quits his role rather than perform the show as a farce, says Richardson, “They get a replacement actor to come in the following day, and he is – bear with me – effectively a Muppet who was a reject from Sesame Street. This is now the new Lear for this production of King Lear. Which sounds inherently absurd. That's kind of the point.
“I originally put down on the page that this character looks like a Muppet, and that's felt right, so we've been pursuing that. And as we've been in rehearsals, what I've been finding is that all these characters we already met in the first scene are so absurd and cranked to the nines that by the time an actual puppet comes on stage, you don't think anything of it. 'All right – here's another weird one.'
“For all intents and purposes, these are effectively human Muppets,” says Richardson of the New Dreadful Players. “They're stereotypical people you'd find in a community theatre – the kind who are locked in not on the show they're doing so much as on the drama associated with the show they're doing. It's that element of people being so invested in their personal drama that they're not able to take a step back and realize how absurd everything around them is.
“So yes, they're all performing with a puppet. But they don't recognize it as a puppet. The same way that when Michael Caine is with Gonzo in Muppet Christmas Carol, he's not with a puppet – he's with Gonzo. We effectively treat the puppet as just another person.”
Included among the To Leer at Lear ensemble are Jack Bevans, Elane Edwards, Adrienne Jane Evans, Evan Gagliardo, Ann Keeney-Graft, Tyler Henning, Noel Jean Huntley, Jeremy Mahr, and Krissy Wheeler. Writer/director/designer Richardson's creative team, meanwhile features stage manager and assistant director Kori Ralston, costume designer Elizabeth Melville, executive producer Traci Davis, and Richardson's wife Sydney Richardson as puppet designer. To hear Richardson tell it, they're all having a ball.
“At rehearsals, we're laughing almost the whole way through,” he says. “The actors are getting each other to break, and everyone is having such a good time. But I don't necessarily feel that we're poking fun at the people it's about. It's more that we're poking fun at the situations they find themselves in, and the way they choose to handle them.
“By and large, I feel it's a love letter to community theatre,” says Richardson, “and the people who invest all their energy and passion into these uphill battles. 'We've been tasked to do this insurmountable thing, so how do we go about doing it?'
“I love, with theatre people, the ones who care so much, and so often the show gets to the finish line and it's just not good. But I still can't help but root for the people who made it. So approaching To Leer at Lear as a director, I'm like, 'How can I make these characters likable, even though they're being these vicious monsters to each other?' Just like in King Lear.”
Barely There Theatre's To Leer at Lear runs at the Black Box Theatre (1623 Fifth Avenue, Moline IL) July 10 through 19, with performances Thursdays through Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are “Pay What's It's Worth” pricing, and more information and reservations are available by visiting Facebook.com/BarelyThereTheatreQC.
