When Greg Vinkler, as King Lear, stands alone on the blasted heath, railing against the elements — “Blow winds, and crack your cheeks! rage, blow/You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout/Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!” — Chicago Shakespeare Theater is only too happy to oblige.
Rain pours, fog swirls, lightning flashes and thunder booms, with all the special effects technology the theater can muster going full blast. It’s as if director Barbara Gaines and her talented designers are out to prove, through this furious display of storm and stress, that “King Lear” is indeed a story of nature upturned, of humanity stripped bare and of a fate unrelenting.
In this midst of this hullabaloo, sometimes drowned out by the roar and crack of the staging, is an incisive, intelligent performance by Vinkler that is centered in a diligent, workmanlike production of this great and impossible play.
A distinguished presence in Chicago Shakespeare from its beginnings, Vinkler does not yet have the grand presence for Lear, but in tackling this backbreaking role, he has prepared for the challenge by arming himself with every skill in his arsenal.
For starters, he appears to have carefully studied the play’s every line in his effort to show the arc of Lear’s journey from vain and petty old man to purged and cleansed tragic hero.
He begins with a rash flash of temper against his gentle, favored daughter Cordelia (Ana Sferruzza), when she refuses to flatter him in order to gain a slice of his kingdom. He moves on to outrage against his other two daughters, Regan and Goneril, when they callously turn against their roistering father; and he proceeds to different stages of madness and grief when he becomes an outcast in the cruel world of nature.
This is a Lear who is majestic in his mountainous anger one minute, pathetic and ridiculous in his spindly vulnerability the next. There is not a moment when Vinkler is not completely into his role, and his clear, forceful line delivery is outstanding in a presentation in which the voices are not always up to the demands of the text.
He is especially good in the transitional phase, between sanity and madness, when a fast-fading Lear is trying to figure out where he failed as a king and as a father. “I did her wrong,” he says of Cordelia, as he muses on his fate, and you can almost hear his mind clicking into rueful knowledge as he says it.
His audience for this bit of self-revelation is Lear’s Fool, the mocking jester who is quick to tell the old man how wrong he has been. As played by Scott Parkinson, his shaved head covered by a coxcomb, this Fool is a wiry acrobat and a wry philosopher, a partner with Lear in exploring and fathoming the consequences of the aged king’s unnatural deeds.
Vinkler and Parkinson are vital forces at the heart of this production, but in other key parts, the portrayals are not able to fill the characters’ dimensions.
Lisa Dodson, another CST regular, suggests the sexual appetite as well as the steely ambition of Goneril as she prowls the thrust stage, but Celeste Williams as the vile, vengeful Regan (“Pluck out his eyes!”) is mostly bland.
As members of the play’s second disjointed family, Patrick Clear struggles manfully to suggest both the goodness and folly of Gloucester, and Timothy Gregory lends an oily, handsome presence to the dark deeds of his bastard son Edmund, but Timothy Kane’s work as the legitimate son Edgar, stripped of everything and cast into darkness, is mild in presence and unfortunately weak in technique.
There are bits of good performances in Kevin Gudahl’s stalwart and faithful Kent, in David Perkovich’s nasty little toady Oswald and in Roger Mueller’s honorable Duke of Albany.
Gaines has introduced a few silent, scurrying, near-naked beggars into the action to emphasize the tragedy’s sense of deprivation and nothingness, but the ensemble acting as a whole is not strong enough to bring this “King Lear” to the emotional depths and poetic heights of which it is capable.
Perhaps by way of compensation, the production design works at peak state-of-the-art performance.
The costumes by Michael Krass range from grandly fashioned furs and robes in the opening court scene to a simple white sleeping robe for Lear in his last moments.
The setting, by Scott Bradley, is transformed from regal surroundings to barren fields when a huge, decorated court curtain is pulled down to reveal a background of wreckage and destruction.
And the intricate lighting design by Donald Holder, which changes patterns instantly within scenes, is enough to test the most sophisticated computer.
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“King Lear”
When: Through April 22
Where: Chicago Shakespeare Theater, 800 E. Grand Ave. on Navy Pier
Phone: 312-595-5600
