Word: lear
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Winsome Brown makes her Harvard debut as Edmund unforgettable. Again, the Edmund that Gammons has chosen to spotlight has lost his affinities to King Lear's "naturally" volatile Edmund--he is too hard-edged, too sophisticated. The Edmund who imagines himself better-suited to being a seagull and who reveres the Decadent poets should be more high-strung, sensitive and romantic. Edmund should have only occasional success in aping Jamie's cynicism...
...characters in O'Neil's Long Day's Journey have two ways of living in the fog they so desperately seek--either live the lie of the Norman Lear family, or drink themselves into oblivion. The actors in this production do not appear drunk enough to make their concessions natural. O'Neil's stage directions speak of a "real, if alcoholic, affection" expressed between Tyrone and Edmund, but this never becomes apparent. O'Neil; emphasized human kinship as a source of isolation but also of communality--O'Neil's love for his third wife empowered him to write this play...
...without warning, Larry decides to turn the property over to his daughters -- Ginny, Rose and Caroline -- and their husbands. If any of this reminds you of King Lear, read on. At the beginning the Cooks seem invulnerable. Only Caroline's defection to Des Moines and marriage to a non- farmer slightly disturb their cohesiveness. But by the end, the father has gone mad, the farm has been lost, the family splintered...
...absorbing, well-plotted novel that it never reads like a gloss on Shakespeare. For one thing, A Thousand Acres has an exact and exhilarating sense of place, a sheer Americanness that gives it its own soul and roots. More important, Ginny and Rose are not villains. Smiley has had Lear at the back of her mind since she first read the play. "I never bought the conventional interpretation that Goneril and Regan were completely evil," she says. "Unconsciously at first, I had reservations: this is not the whole story...
...Seeing Akira Kurosawa's Ran, also based on Lear, provided the missing link. In the film the daughters are sons, and one of them tells the old man that his children are what he made them. Smiley began reading commentaries about the play, especially by feminists, and was miffed to find that even the most radical rejected Shakespeare's terrible twosome: "A remark condemning Goneril and Regan was de rigueur...