Bringing King Lear to Life by Lamplight in the Park

Last night I played Goneril in staged reading of King Lear in front of a live audience of our friends. It was an abridged version because to do the entire play would take something like 5 hours, which is rarely done any more. Besides, this was street theater, done outdoors in a park (Douglas Park in Santa Monica, CA), at night, by lamplight, so it was quite chilly.

Our audience sat on a hill and we performed on a concrete intersection of paths under a nice bright lamp. Stage readings are a way to perform a play or to hone your techniques in front of a live audience without violating any Equity Guild rules. As long as you hold the book (script) in your hand, you are technically reading. However, you can act your heart out as much as you want and you can have as much of the script memorized as you want or not.

I was quite fortunate that my friends Pam and Serge, Steve, and Mike and Penny with their dog Tootsie (who apparently likes to watch plays) all came to see me perform and to support me. Since I do truly care about what these people think of me, it was important that I do well.

And I think I can comfortably say, I did. To the left, you see me here with King Lear in the famous beginning scene where King Lear asks his daughters to tell him how much they love him. Since he was partitioning and giving away his kingdom in response to the bountifulness of that love, you can bet Goneril was very effusive.

The audience loved our performance. And I loved playing the role. Yes, it has reactivated the bug to act that was in me when I was a child. But back then all the roles seemed to go to the beauty queens. Even the roles of the boy/girl next door were gorgeous people dressed in dowdy clothes and glasses to distinguish them from the hero/heroines. I used to think that if the boy next door to me was that good-looking, I'd pay more attention to him.

This is not to say there weren't hitches. The weather had been warm in the days leading up to the performance, but that day was chilly and the evening even colder. For me, that meant tights under my long dress and shawls around my shoulders. Though the layers fit the times of the character, they also made me look like a beached whale in some of the photos.

For our audience, that meant sitting on the cold ground. Kudos to the love they had for us that they bore with us.

The worst hitch was that due to unforeseen circumstances, our actor playing King Lear didn't show up. Being the director, lead actor, and chief mastermind behind the performance, he had been working on cutting the script down to a workable size for us to do in two hours, while still having the whole gist of the story told. We were only working with about six or seven key roles in the play.

At 6pm, MELANEE E. NELSON (Cordelia, The Fool), HOLLIS McLACHLAN (Regan), MELVIN WEISS (Gloucester), TOHURU MASAMUNE (Edmund), TROY SPIELER (Edgar) and I gathered on our 'stage' for our final notes or blocking. We were surprised that our King Lear wasn't there waiting for us, but we waited patiently until our guests began arriving at 6:30 for our 7 pm start.

Contacting him, we learned that he was frantically trying to cut the script even further because we had lost one of our actors. Melanee, our producer, told him not to worry, we had a handsome young actor in the audience, a friend of Hollis, named MARCUS PROCTOR, who would gladly step in and read the parts of Oswald and The Fool (when Cordelia was also on stage) for us. We told our King Lear to make a few extra copies for the new guy and for me, because I hadn't gotten the latest version he had passed out at a rehearsal I couldn't attend.

Marcus, as my servant Oswald, can be seen in the above right photo with me. The above left photo is King Lear attending the death of Cordelia.

Our guests had been told to come at 6:30 because we were going to start at 7 pm sharp. And so at 6:30 our guests arrived, but we still didn't have our King Lear or the extra copies. Seven came around and we still didn't have our King Lear or the extra copies. The extra copies were not a big problem because we just passed what we had back and forth behind the stage, since we were really talking about being short one real copy and mine was pretty much up to date... as Goneril's lines were all intact. I was only worried because a cue line could have been cut in a rehearsal I couldn't attend, and without having the same exact copy the others were using, I wouldn't know it.

It turned out to only affect me in one cue, where I was waiting for a line that didn't come. Nevertheless, I quickly surmised it had been cut and jumped into my dialogue, so maybe the audience didn't even notice the difference.

By 7:15, we were all worried for our audience. After all, it was cold to sit there on the hill and it was a Sunday night and everyone had to go to work on Monday -- we couldn't start the play too much later. The actors voted to start the play without our King Lear. Troy volunteered to play King Lear as well as Edgar until our King Lear showed up. Melanee called our King Lear and told him to just get there -- we were going to start at 7:30 and Troy would fill in until he came.

Somehow, signals got crossed and Don thought he had been replaced and hence, never showed up. So Troy had to play both Edgar and King Lear to the end.

And I must say that Troy played it quite well considering he had had no preparation time. It just got sticky at the end where Troy had to play Edgar and King Lear engaged with each other. Had he had time to think about doing a dual role, I'm sure he would have created larger differences between the characters, but we kept expecting Don to take over, so nobody thought about it until that scene at the end until it was upon us.

My friends said they were confused at that point. And that is understandable. They said they were able to figure out by context of the dialogue who was who but they had to work at it and it wasn't readily apparent. But they were good sports about it. Well, where else would they see the death of Edmund on cold, cold, hard concrete?

Seriously, I have to say that all the actors were brilliant in their performances and I thank them from the bottom of my heart for making this performance memorable for me. Prior to this, my only other recent work in front of a live audience had been a small part in a radio play, so this was quite important to me.

And I am happy that I achieved what I set out to do. It was wonderful to work with such talented and experienced actors as they all were.

And now I have to say something about these superb photos done my wonderful friend, Serge, under the most challenging circumstances. It was dark and the only source of illumination was the lamplight we were reading under. I was expecting to see blurry figures barely distinguishable from a dark background and I said, at least I'll have something to remember the night by. Instead I got these marvelously clear photos that show us doing our scenes as brilliantly as if we had a full lighting crew with us. A movie crew couldn't do better.

If you want to see the full set of Serge's photos, please visit cgivfx's Flickr page. They are well worth it. And while you are at it, look at some of his other photos -- they are all spectacular.

All I can say is thank you for making the evening memorable for me... to him and his wife Pam, my other guests, and to everyone who came out to see us living the dream.