Bringing King Lear to the Park

Here is a view of the duck pond in Douglas Park in Santa Monica, CA where we held today's rehearsal for our staged reading of King Lear. Yes, I could have gotten closer so you could see the ducks better, but I am standing on the "stage" from whence we will be performing the play on October 4, 2009 at 7 pm. Anyone who would like to see this work in progress staged reading is welcome to come. Just bring a blanket because you will be sitting on the hill facing our "stage."

You heard of bringing plays to the street? Well, our street performance of Shakespeare will be in the park. Cool, right?

To the right you see some of our actors rehearsing the play on our new stage. Gloucester is on the left, Edmund is in the center and Lear is on the right.

I'm playing Goneril, but since I'm working the camera here, you won't see my picture when I'm doing my scenes. We did some blocking for this new stage. And we ran through some of my scenes as well. Don who plays King Lear is also our director for this staged reading.

Atrium Theater Group's King Lear With Me as Goneril

The Atrium Theater Group under artistic director Don Baldaramos and producer Melanee Nelson (pictured at the left) are gearing up for an October 4th stage reading of Shakespeare's King Lear, in which I will be playing eldest daughter Goneril.

This will be our second stage reading -- the first one was only of the first two acts, this will be of the entire play. I'm excited, but there's a lot of hard work to be done before that.

On Sunday, we went through all the actor headshots from the auditions held by the former director of this stage reading, who had to drop out of the production for family reasons. Don Baldaramos will be assuming those directing duties as well as playing lead character, King Lear. Melanee will be playing middle sister Regan.

Afterwards, Melanee and I emailed the actors we were interested in to tell them the good news.

We do not have a venue for this Sunday evening performance nailed down yet, but if you want to come see the stage reading, you are invited and welcome.