Word: caine
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...Bill Cain's King Lear creates ironies like that; the production staggers like blind Gloucester between a formal, tradition-ridden interpretation and a self-consciously innovative approach, until it topples over a Dover cliff of its own creation into farce. Too many serious lines receive laughs, or worse, snickers, from BSC's audience; the incongruities in Cain's direction must take the blame...
...squat, waving a wooden gyroscope over his head like some mystical wand. The standard swipes, grunts, and lunges of the Shakespearian sword-fight punctuate the duel between Edgar and Edmund, but the preceding battle between France's forces and the English army becomes a strange slow-motion dumbshow on Cain's stage...
Such apparent indecision on the director's part knocks the audience off balance. It doesn't help that Cain chooses the very middle of Act III--right before Lear enter's Poor Tom's hovel--for his intermission; the mounting horror in the theater suddenly dissipates when you buy your "Jamaica Cola" in the lobby, and it's difficult to take Lear's self-dramatizing declamation right after a desultory intermission conversation, or a trip to the rest rooms. Thus such atrocities as the general guffaw that followed Lear's "Didst thou give all to thy daughters?" last Thursday night...
Lebow rears his tall bulk up, out of the general confusion at ground level, and almost manages to clear away the smoke Cain's direction pours forth. This is a confident Lear, a rarity considering how many critics believe the role nearly unplayable. Lebow's accomplished command of the Shakespearean line never falters under the unreasonable demands of his role; try shouting "vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts" sometime, for example, and see how easy...
...farmers who unwisely took on onerous debts in the mid-1970s to buy costly new acreage in the be lief that prices for farm land would continue to soar. The typical farmer, who has a modest 170 in debt for every dollar in assets, has no need to raise Cain in Washington...