The King has the sniffles.
Greg Vinkler is playing the most famous monarch in theatrical history and he can feel, in the back of a cruelly overtaxed throat, a slight soreness.
But King Lear must bellow. King Lear must rage. A king with a tissue tucked in the sleeve of his royal robe?
Unthinkable.
Or so you say. Vinkler thinks otherwise.
“It’s actually very interesting,” he said after a recent matinee of “King Lear,” the Chicago Shakespeare Theater production that began Feb. 9 and runs until April 29. “Some of my best performances have been when I’m really sick. It’s because you end up doing only what you have to do. It becomes focused. Clearer. It’s not clouded. You don’t expend any extraneous energy.”
For Vinkler, who has played 28 other Shakespearean characters but never before attempted the title role in what many consider the most challenging play of all time, his first turn as Lear marks a professional and personal turning point.
He is climbing what the play’s director, Barbara Gaines, called “the Mt. Everest” of the Lear role, and he knows that the view from that summit will be like nothing he has ever seen before.
“I wanted to do Lear for me. I’m on a journey,” Vinkler said of the dark and complicated part. “This role is hard. It deals with the issues of an old man, issues that I’m starting to think about myself. This play will be looked at more in the next 20 to 30 years than ever before, I think, because of a focus on the concerns of Baby Boomers.”
The play, first performed in 1606 but probably written the year before, details the fate of Lear, the aging king who unwisely divides his kingdom between his two conniving daughters, Goneril and Regan. A third daughter, Cordelia, is pure of heart and loves her father, but incurs his wrath by refusing to pledge her love in grandiose terms — what she derisively calls “that glib and oily art/To speak and purpose not.”
Turned out by the treacherous twosome and their “monster ingratitude,” as Lear sees it, the king wanders through a storm accompanied by a riddle-spouting fool and the loyal Earl of Kent, in disguise. Lear’s downward spiral is mirrored by the woes of the Earl of Gloucester, who mistakenly trusts one son (the evil Edmund) while banishing another (the good Edgar).
“King Lear” grapples with themes of youth and age, of a parent’s recognition of infirmity and a child’s acceptance or rejection of responsibility for that parent — themes that are, as Vinkler noted, of increasing significance to a maturing generation.
Beautiful language
It is also, of course, a play filled with fierce and beautiful language, moving toward its almost unbearably tragic climax amid bone-rattling thunder and torrents of rain. “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” Lear fulminates in Act III, Scene 2. “Rage, blow!/ You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout/Till you have drenched out steeples, drowned the cocks.”
The actor playing Lear must leap from emotional peak to emotional peak, sustaining a fever-pitch of passion and anger. The distance between that character — a deposed and raging king — and the real-life Vinkler, mild and shy, is a span that precisely delineates the magical arc of the actor’s craft.
“I’m not the most scintillating person in the world,” Vinkler said with a slight smile. “I’m on the quiet side. But I have no problem being on stage. Theater allowed me to not only do the thing I was born to do — if people are actually born to do things — but also gave me a world in which I could blossom.”
Vinkler, 49, was fortifying himself after the performance with a sandwich and a small cup of chicken soup, all designed to fend off a cold that the audience, most likely, did not even realize he was harboring.
Dressed in jeans, flannel shirt and an olive baseball cap, Vinkler looked much smaller in person than he does as the onstage Lear. At first he answered questions about himself and his profession rather haltingly and self-consciously; but as he became more comfortable, he sounded stronger, more confident.
“I’ve been gearing up to do Lear since last spring,” Vinkler said. “So I have it all in my head, at least in terms of surviving it. I have to get my sleep. I try to make sure my back is OK. And I have to have a banana and a snack bar at intermission. I drink lots of water. I’ve been good at staying away from coffee.”
But even with these precautions, a cold will take its toll. Vinkler’s understudy has needed to take over for him at two performances.
His partner of 14 years, Todd Schmidt, concurred in a separate interview that the physical and emotional requirements of playing Lear have been daunting for Vinkler.
“There is more intensity in this,” than in Vinkler’s previous roles, said Schmidt, general manager of Peninsula Players, a summer theater in Door County, Wis., for which Vinkler serves as artistic director. “He’s done other large parts in Shakespeare. But this one is much more demanding on an actor than any other role he’s done. You have to learn how to do this role and not lose your voice every day. Everything he usually does has all been upped a notch.”
Vinkler, Schmidt said, is “probably the most dedicated, hard-working actor I’ve ever seen. He’s incredibly meticulous and detailed in his research.”
A work in progress
In the home they share on the city’s Northwest Side, Schmidt said, Vinkler has continued to work on his performance. “He’s fairly good about being quiet about it. But sometimes when he’s in his office with his script, you hear a lot of low mumbling.”
For all the flamboyance and grandiosity of the character that audiences see in “King Lear,” the real Vinkler is different, Schmidt said. “They have no idea. Greg is one of those people who, onstage, is huge and filled with life and energy and power. Offstage, he seems like an average joe. If you saw him at a party, you’d think, `No, he can’t be an actor.’ You wouldn’t know.”
Vinkler was born and raised on Chicago’s Southwest Side. His late father was an insurance salesman; his mother, Ann, who still lives in the Chicago area, took care of Vinkler and his three brothers and two sisters.
“My first play was in grammar school. It was a Christmas play and I played God,” Vinkler recalled with a chuckle.
But portraying the Almighty did not seem to constitute a heavenly message regarding a future profession, he added. “I don’t remember ever making the connection that that’s what I liked to do. I don’t remember anyone ever saying to me, `Well, you ought to try acting.'”
After graduation from Marist High School, Vinkler attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “I thought I was going to major in music. But then I got to college and I didn’t like music theory and harmonics and all that.”
Instantaneous calling
On a whim, he enrolled in a beginning acting class. The epiphany smote him like the hilt of a sword. “That was it. It was instantaneous,” Vinkler said, his voice brimming with awe at the memory. “I can’t describe it. It was, `This is what I have to do.’ It wasn’t only the performance part. I loved the people. I’d never felt such camaraderie and acceptance as I did in that acting class.”
Vinkler’s mother said she and her husband initially were stunned at their son’s career choice.
“I had no inkling that he wanted to do that. And I didn’t think he’d go through with it. But I’m so pleased he’s found something he enjoys. He really throws himself into his parts,” she said. “When he’s in the middle of a role, he’s not `Greg’ anymore. He lives, breathes and eats it.”
However, things weren’t easy for a fledgling actor, Vinkler admitted. After graduating from Illinois, he hung out in Chicago for a few months, then headed for New York.
“I went sight unseen,” he said. “I had $200, that’s all. No job. I took the train, got out at the station, put my boxes into a cab, gave him the address of a friend on the Upper West Side, got to the apartment and my friend Tom says, `I’ve gotta go.’ He took the cab. So I’m standing there [in the apartment] all alone; the phone rings; I pick it up.” Vinkler mimicked the sound of an obscene caller. “And I went, `Oh, no-o-o-o-o,” he said, putting his head in his hands.
“But I survived. I was pretty young. I really didn’t understand any of it. There are things you do in your life that, if you knew what you were doing, you’d never do. I think about that time now and — oh, my God,'” Vinkler said, shaking his head.
His big break, ironically, was his decision to return to the Midwest. He studied acting in graduate school at Ohio University in Athens, then settled back in Chicago. Here he joined a thriving community of young professional actors in which, despite fierce competition, he was able to make his way.
“I’ve been lucky to work constantly,” Vinkler said. He has performed in nearly all of the city’s professional companies, and in productions in Pittsburgh, Milwaukee and Lansing, Mich., as well as in Vienna and London. He has appeared in several films, such as “Who Am I This Time?,” but prefers stage work.
Before Lear, the role for which Chicago audiences probably remember him best is Falstaff in “Henry IV,” Parts I and II, which the Chicago Shakespeare Theater staged in 1999. He has also played, among his more than two dozen other Shakespearean parts, Malvolio in “Twelfth Night” and Angelo in “Measure for Measure.”
Success demands some difficult choices. He played Scanlon in the recent Steppenwolf production of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” which has moved to Broadway with its Chicago cast largely intact, but Vinkler had to turn down the New York gig to play Lear.
“It was a tough call,” Vinkler said, “but I felt in my gut that I’d do Lear. This is one of the few opportunities to play Lear.”
`Complete chameleon’
In a 1993 Chicago Shakespeare Theater production of “King Lear,” Vinkler portrayed Gloucester. But being Lear is different. “Honestly,” he said, “it’s like doing another play.
“It’s a great story. A little over two pages into the play and it goes — Boom! You’re right in it. There’s something about Shakespeare I just connect with.”
Among the challenges, he added, is the play’s almost holy status among theater lovers. “Dozens of people have come up to me and said, `Oh, you’re doing “Lear.” That’s my favorite play. I love it.’ So there are these incredible expectations. I know that I will never please everyone who’s going to see the show.”
He has, however, pleased the person who matters most: the director. Gaines said Vinkler’s interpretation of the role is “dangerous, complex, filled with shades of gray.” She called the actor “a complete chameleon. He shifts so easily in and out of different productions. He’s brilliant.”
Yet he continues to tinker with the role of Lear, Vinkler said, even now that he’s well into the play’s run. “Every performance is different. I do try to learn from each one and not repeat a performance. Every show we do, I learn something. I think Shakespeare has taught me about life. My whole experience with Shakespeare has been a growing one.
“When I was doing Falstaff, there were some nights when I’d be on the side of the theater, waiting to go on, getting into character, and I’d think, `I can’t do this. I can’t.’ I would just breathe and kind of let Falstaff take over. I don’t know how to describe it except to say that he would enter me and say, `Greg, it’s OK. I’ll take you on this trip and we’ll have a great time and I’ll let you off at the exit.'”
Vinkler laughed self-consciously. “I wasn’t possessed or anything. But all of a sudden, he was teaching me about life, about being in the moment.”
Assuming the role
He has let Lear inside him as well, the actor added. “Lear goes on a very egocentric passage, from being burned in the fires of hell and coming out spiritually a whole person. That’s a wonderful thing to be able to go through. It’s hard, but it’s great.
“At the end of the play, it’s like, `All that crap doesn’t mean anything. It’s the people you love and who love you and just being open to the possibilities in the world and seeing things for what they are, not what you want them to be.’ But I’m still learning about this role. I’m sure I’ll get to our closing day and go, `Oh! Now I get this. This is what it is.’
“And if I ever do it again, I’m sure I’ll find something else. I’m part of the process of taking the audience on a journey.”
Asked why that journey is important, why, in fact, theater matters at all in a world that often seems in too much of a rush to pay much attention to the arts. Vinkler paused. On stage, he is a great listener; you almost feel as if you’re watching his mind react for the first time to the words that are spoken to him.
In person, he exhibited the same quality: He listened, then ruminated before he answered. There is nothing glib about Vinkler.
“I don’t know, except to say that if everything was destroyed tomorrow, theater would be one of the first things to come back. There’s just something magical about it. There will be always be storytellers.”
