About the Play
In the spring of 2007, Gardner-Webb University Theater mounted a daring postmodern deconstruction of Shakespeare's play King Lear entitled LEAR ReLoaded, written and directed by Scot Lahaie. This retelling of the King Lear myth explores the weak dualities of god/man and blessing/cursing in order to underline the medieval mindset of the original work and re-position the narrative as a post-modern dramatic event. Although the play is a derivative work, it preserves much of the Bard’s original language.
About thE PROCESS
According to Wikipedia, “deconstruction is a term in contemporary philosophy and social sciences denoting a process by which the texts and languages of Western philosophy (in particular) appear to shift and complicate in meaning, when read in light of the assumptions they suggest about and absences they reveal within themselves.” In a story dominated by the masculine, for example, the feminine is marginalized at best and often completely absent. In a deconstructive analysis, the goal of the critic would be to dethrone the masculine from its place of dominance at the center of the story, drawing attention to the overlooked or marginalized other with the hope of striking a balance between poles of the masculine/feminine duality. In many ways, this is breaking a literary work down into smaller pieces to discover its structure and see how it works.
Theatrical deconstructions function differently than those employed by the critic. Unlike philosophical or literary deconstructions, the theatrical deconstruction has to be performed. This implies a need to reassemble the parts in a new order, discarding some pieces, and adding new materials to complete the process, all for the purpose of telling the story from a different advantage point. In a performance context, therefore, deconstruction is understood as a postmodern tool employed by theater people to ferret out the unspoken underlying assumptions of a work of art, as well as to point up certain underlying assumptions about literature, reality, philosophy, and worldview, with the goal of creating an original work of art based on another. It is also a critique upon the modernist assumption that a work of art can be unified at all, a modernist claim of the early 20th century.
After several thorough readings of the play, the first step of a theatrical deconstruction is to make a list of dualities present in the play. I make a distinction between strong and weak dualities. A duality where two poles are equally matched is called a strong duality. A duality where one of the two poles is significantly marginalized or completely absent is called a weak duality. It is upon the weak dualities that we build our work. In my reading of King Lear, I identified a number of strong dualities. One of the most obvious was the Male/Female divide. The feminine in this play is equally matched to the masculine—the daughters wrangle with their father, the King, and win. They lock the doors of the house and send him into the storm to rant and rave. The dualities of age (old/young and parent/child) were also well matched, so these were quickly dismissed. In all, I identified twelve strong dualities: Male/Female, Old/Young, Parent/Child, Pride/Humility, Greed/Generosity, Selfishness/Selflessness, King/Servant, Wise/Foolish, Seeing/Blind, Truth/Deception, Trust/Betrayal, and Murder/Self-sacrifice. I eventually identified three weak dualities: Gods/Men with gods being strangely absent, Spirit/Flesh with things spiritual strangely absent, and Cursing/Blessing with words of blessing being strangely absent. I chose to work with these three dualities as the foundation for our process.
One of the things that struck me during this process was the theological perspective suggested by these weak dualities that embrace the spiritual aspects of our humanity. I have often been troubled by the tendency for educated people in our contemporary age to dismiss the spiritual world described in ancient religious text (to include the Bible) as mere superstition. When Jesus, for example, spoke of demons, it is assumed by some that he was actually using the word demon as a metaphor for acts or attitudes of men that most would now simply call evil. It has always been the position that since Modern science and educated people do not believe in such fairy tales, texts like these are best sanitized for a modern reader, which simply robs a play like King Lear of its spiritual depth. I remembered seeing several “modern” productions of King Lear that played the King’s ranting as words of anger—cussing, if you will—and began to realize why this seemed so shallow. In a medieval mind set, and even from an English Renaissance perspective, curses spoken in the name of a god (Jove, Jupiter, Heceta, et al) were believed to have power. Such words were spoken with the expectation that the gods would descend and carry out the curse or blessing. With these thoughts firmly in my mind, I began to explore ways to restore this original theological mindset to the play. In doing so, I would restore to the play the marginalized poles of these dualities.
With the weak dualities chosen, the next step of the deconstruction process was to search the play for textual references to the dominant and marginalized poles of these three dualities. I was pleased to discover a huge number of curses in the play, the lion’s share being pronounced by Lear himself. The number of references to blessing could be counted on one hand, and several of these were encouragements to the King to ask for his daughter’s blessings which were rejected by the hard-hearted King without consideration. I was also pleased to discover that many of the characters spoke regularly of the gods (mostly in curses), but that there was not one reference to a priest or spiritual guide or an oracle or shaman or a church or temple or even the act of prayer. I didn’t even find significant reference to the afterlife, which I found unusually strange since this play is ultimately about the King’s passing, as well as the death of so many in his court. The characters in the play regularly called upon the gods, but the gods were absent. They did not seem to hear, and did not seem to respond. And yet, why all the devastation at the end of the play? Was it just happenstance? Did the King bring it upon himself in some political way? Or were the gods hearing Lear’s every curse? Were the gods silently and invisibly bringing his words to pass?
Content with the textual discoveries that I had made, I began the task of turning the hierarchy of the play on its head. If the gods have been marginalized, perhaps even lost, to modern interpreters of the play, the best way to turn this weak duality into a strong duality would be to write the gods into the play. I chose to do this by adding a chorus to the play, much like the plays of Sophocles and the ancient Greeks employed. A particular reference had stuck in my mind while searching for curses: “You nimble lighting, dart your blinding flames into her scornful eyes! Infect her beauty, you fen-suck fogs drawn by the powerful sun to fall and blister.” In this passage the King is calling first upon the nimble lighting to blind his daughter’s eyes. He then calls upon the fen-sucked fogs to fall and blister her. Impressed with the imagery in this passage, I decided to imagine our chorus of gods as spirits of the fog, knowing that stage fog would be a logical design choice to support this idea. Our chorus eventually came to be called the “People of the Fog.”
It is usual in literary deconstructions to seek ways to deny the plot or subvert the story, believing that the plot is a tool of the dominant force in the play and is the primary means of marginalizing the weaker element of the duality. Others seek to trace what lies “between the lines” or what is suggested by “connecting the dots” or to speak that which has not been said. In my journey, I chose to simply begin writing—to begin rewriting. I searched the text for every curse that Lear spoke during the play and lifted them from their context. I then strung these curses end to end and called it Act One. Having seen that Lear’s curses were the direct cause of his daughter’s deaths, I pulled together the passages of death in the play and strung them together end to end and called it the Last Act (this eventually became Act Four). The play was becoming a journey from curse pronouncement to curse fulfillment. This was, without a doubt, the story I was after.
It is at this stage that our process finds legs. I sat down with my colleague Christopher Keene (Designer and Technical director) to discuss the ideas I had put together so far, since one of the prominent hallmarks of the postmodern theater production process is collaboration. And collaborate we did. Chris found my ideas exciting. He began to suggest ways to stage the work that I had begun to conceive. His ideas stirred more ideas in me. Excited and encouraged, I returned to my desk and continued my work. This collaborative process of writing, discussing, visualizing, and returning to write continued throughout the fall term. In the end, it was hard to separate out my work from my colleague’s.
Knowing where Lear’s journey begins (curses) and where it ends (death), I realized that the journey between those points dealt with Lear’s insanity. Returning to Shakespeare’s original text, I discovered that there were as many insanity scenes as there were curses, if not more. I searched the text for every scene governed by madness and lifted them from the text and strung them end to end and called it Act Three. In order to make sense of the story, we needed to keep the inciting incident in place, so I lifted the scene where Lear divides his kingdom and banishes Kent and Cordelia and called it Act Two. I edited the scene to contain just the bare bones required for the inciting incident. With these basic parts in place, a journey from cursing through insanity to death, I began to insert into the text the chanting of the chorus. When the king called upon the name of a god, the chorus would respond with the words “We hear, oh great king, and respond.” With yet a new draft of the play in hand, I returned again to my designer colleague. Some of the theatrical effects I suggested in my draft were cut or altered due to the realities of budget or staging practicalities. Other effects that I thought were surely bound for the graveyard of off-the-wall ideas were embraced with enthusiasm. We discussed the idea of using projection screens to cast images behind the actions. We embraced the idea that cylinders made of gauze would descend from above and engulf the characters being cursed, a theatrical representation of being cut off from the King’s favor. The chorus would be instrumental in executing these effects on stage. The collected deaths in Act Four would be played out like a police crime scene with painted outlines for the corpses. The play began to take shape.
As the use of projection screens became foundational to the design, we recognized that scaffolding was required to support the screens. A single reference in my script about costuming resembling rock star apparel congealed our thoughts about the show. The fog and the lights and the screens and the scaffolds became elements of a rock concert. Lear became a strutting voice of arrogance like Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones. The evil Edmund suddenly had the look and feel of Alice Cooper or a rocker of similar ilk. The design was now being driven by images of American and British rock and the Hollywood jet set. The setting was a rock concert.
Halfway through the rehearsal process, we realized that something significant was missing—music. Almost as an afterthought, we cast a young hard core guitarist on our campus to play ripping metal guitar licks at the top of the show and during the scene changes. We were incredibly pleased and surprise to discover that our guitarist, young Jon Lorbacher, was also a songwriter. He did more than just play for us. He wrote an original score for the show accompanied by a digital drum track. This musical addition brought the diverse elements together and became the crowning glory for our production.
In production, our show ran seventy minutes. It was loud, colorful, visually fascinating, and fast-paced. Our audiences reacted to the work in many different ways. For those that knew Shakespeare’s original, the play held a lot of literary value. Most were able to follow the ideas in play, since they had knowledge of the referent upon which it was built. This is, of course, one of the weaknesses of a postmodern deconstruction—it requires knowledge of the work being deconstructed. The students who did not know Shakespeare’s original were lost to the literary reference, but most found the work “cool and exciting.” To quote one student, “I don’t know what that was, but it sure was cool.” Community members, often from an older generation, generally found the work puzzling. Some even found it troubling and godless, an ironic statement considering we had put the gods back in Shakespeare’s godless play. As for us—director, designers, actors, musicians, and technicians—we are extremely pleased and satisfied at the creative venture that Lear ReLoaded was for us. It is our hope that you will find this work, as we have shared it in this photo book, as exciting and enjoyable as we have found it to be.
Scot Lahaie
January 2008
(From the Introduction of the Photobook)
Theatrical deconstructions function differently than those employed by the critic. Unlike philosophical or literary deconstructions, the theatrical deconstruction has to be performed. This implies a need to reassemble the parts in a new order, discarding some pieces, and adding new materials to complete the process, all for the purpose of telling the story from a different advantage point. In a performance context, therefore, deconstruction is understood as a postmodern tool employed by theater people to ferret out the unspoken underlying assumptions of a work of art, as well as to point up certain underlying assumptions about literature, reality, philosophy, and worldview, with the goal of creating an original work of art based on another. It is also a critique upon the modernist assumption that a work of art can be unified at all, a modernist claim of the early 20th century.
After several thorough readings of the play, the first step of a theatrical deconstruction is to make a list of dualities present in the play. I make a distinction between strong and weak dualities. A duality where two poles are equally matched is called a strong duality. A duality where one of the two poles is significantly marginalized or completely absent is called a weak duality. It is upon the weak dualities that we build our work. In my reading of King Lear, I identified a number of strong dualities. One of the most obvious was the Male/Female divide. The feminine in this play is equally matched to the masculine—the daughters wrangle with their father, the King, and win. They lock the doors of the house and send him into the storm to rant and rave. The dualities of age (old/young and parent/child) were also well matched, so these were quickly dismissed. In all, I identified twelve strong dualities: Male/Female, Old/Young, Parent/Child, Pride/Humility, Greed/Generosity, Selfishness/Selflessness, King/Servant, Wise/Foolish, Seeing/Blind, Truth/Deception, Trust/Betrayal, and Murder/Self-sacrifice. I eventually identified three weak dualities: Gods/Men with gods being strangely absent, Spirit/Flesh with things spiritual strangely absent, and Cursing/Blessing with words of blessing being strangely absent. I chose to work with these three dualities as the foundation for our process.
One of the things that struck me during this process was the theological perspective suggested by these weak dualities that embrace the spiritual aspects of our humanity. I have often been troubled by the tendency for educated people in our contemporary age to dismiss the spiritual world described in ancient religious text (to include the Bible) as mere superstition. When Jesus, for example, spoke of demons, it is assumed by some that he was actually using the word demon as a metaphor for acts or attitudes of men that most would now simply call evil. It has always been the position that since Modern science and educated people do not believe in such fairy tales, texts like these are best sanitized for a modern reader, which simply robs a play like King Lear of its spiritual depth. I remembered seeing several “modern” productions of King Lear that played the King’s ranting as words of anger—cussing, if you will—and began to realize why this seemed so shallow. In a medieval mind set, and even from an English Renaissance perspective, curses spoken in the name of a god (Jove, Jupiter, Heceta, et al) were believed to have power. Such words were spoken with the expectation that the gods would descend and carry out the curse or blessing. With these thoughts firmly in my mind, I began to explore ways to restore this original theological mindset to the play. In doing so, I would restore to the play the marginalized poles of these dualities.
With the weak dualities chosen, the next step of the deconstruction process was to search the play for textual references to the dominant and marginalized poles of these three dualities. I was pleased to discover a huge number of curses in the play, the lion’s share being pronounced by Lear himself. The number of references to blessing could be counted on one hand, and several of these were encouragements to the King to ask for his daughter’s blessings which were rejected by the hard-hearted King without consideration. I was also pleased to discover that many of the characters spoke regularly of the gods (mostly in curses), but that there was not one reference to a priest or spiritual guide or an oracle or shaman or a church or temple or even the act of prayer. I didn’t even find significant reference to the afterlife, which I found unusually strange since this play is ultimately about the King’s passing, as well as the death of so many in his court. The characters in the play regularly called upon the gods, but the gods were absent. They did not seem to hear, and did not seem to respond. And yet, why all the devastation at the end of the play? Was it just happenstance? Did the King bring it upon himself in some political way? Or were the gods hearing Lear’s every curse? Were the gods silently and invisibly bringing his words to pass?
Content with the textual discoveries that I had made, I began the task of turning the hierarchy of the play on its head. If the gods have been marginalized, perhaps even lost, to modern interpreters of the play, the best way to turn this weak duality into a strong duality would be to write the gods into the play. I chose to do this by adding a chorus to the play, much like the plays of Sophocles and the ancient Greeks employed. A particular reference had stuck in my mind while searching for curses: “You nimble lighting, dart your blinding flames into her scornful eyes! Infect her beauty, you fen-suck fogs drawn by the powerful sun to fall and blister.” In this passage the King is calling first upon the nimble lighting to blind his daughter’s eyes. He then calls upon the fen-sucked fogs to fall and blister her. Impressed with the imagery in this passage, I decided to imagine our chorus of gods as spirits of the fog, knowing that stage fog would be a logical design choice to support this idea. Our chorus eventually came to be called the “People of the Fog.”
It is usual in literary deconstructions to seek ways to deny the plot or subvert the story, believing that the plot is a tool of the dominant force in the play and is the primary means of marginalizing the weaker element of the duality. Others seek to trace what lies “between the lines” or what is suggested by “connecting the dots” or to speak that which has not been said. In my journey, I chose to simply begin writing—to begin rewriting. I searched the text for every curse that Lear spoke during the play and lifted them from their context. I then strung these curses end to end and called it Act One. Having seen that Lear’s curses were the direct cause of his daughter’s deaths, I pulled together the passages of death in the play and strung them together end to end and called it the Last Act (this eventually became Act Four). The play was becoming a journey from curse pronouncement to curse fulfillment. This was, without a doubt, the story I was after.
It is at this stage that our process finds legs. I sat down with my colleague Christopher Keene (Designer and Technical director) to discuss the ideas I had put together so far, since one of the prominent hallmarks of the postmodern theater production process is collaboration. And collaborate we did. Chris found my ideas exciting. He began to suggest ways to stage the work that I had begun to conceive. His ideas stirred more ideas in me. Excited and encouraged, I returned to my desk and continued my work. This collaborative process of writing, discussing, visualizing, and returning to write continued throughout the fall term. In the end, it was hard to separate out my work from my colleague’s.
Knowing where Lear’s journey begins (curses) and where it ends (death), I realized that the journey between those points dealt with Lear’s insanity. Returning to Shakespeare’s original text, I discovered that there were as many insanity scenes as there were curses, if not more. I searched the text for every scene governed by madness and lifted them from the text and strung them end to end and called it Act Three. In order to make sense of the story, we needed to keep the inciting incident in place, so I lifted the scene where Lear divides his kingdom and banishes Kent and Cordelia and called it Act Two. I edited the scene to contain just the bare bones required for the inciting incident. With these basic parts in place, a journey from cursing through insanity to death, I began to insert into the text the chanting of the chorus. When the king called upon the name of a god, the chorus would respond with the words “We hear, oh great king, and respond.” With yet a new draft of the play in hand, I returned again to my designer colleague. Some of the theatrical effects I suggested in my draft were cut or altered due to the realities of budget or staging practicalities. Other effects that I thought were surely bound for the graveyard of off-the-wall ideas were embraced with enthusiasm. We discussed the idea of using projection screens to cast images behind the actions. We embraced the idea that cylinders made of gauze would descend from above and engulf the characters being cursed, a theatrical representation of being cut off from the King’s favor. The chorus would be instrumental in executing these effects on stage. The collected deaths in Act Four would be played out like a police crime scene with painted outlines for the corpses. The play began to take shape.
As the use of projection screens became foundational to the design, we recognized that scaffolding was required to support the screens. A single reference in my script about costuming resembling rock star apparel congealed our thoughts about the show. The fog and the lights and the screens and the scaffolds became elements of a rock concert. Lear became a strutting voice of arrogance like Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones. The evil Edmund suddenly had the look and feel of Alice Cooper or a rocker of similar ilk. The design was now being driven by images of American and British rock and the Hollywood jet set. The setting was a rock concert.
Halfway through the rehearsal process, we realized that something significant was missing—music. Almost as an afterthought, we cast a young hard core guitarist on our campus to play ripping metal guitar licks at the top of the show and during the scene changes. We were incredibly pleased and surprise to discover that our guitarist, young Jon Lorbacher, was also a songwriter. He did more than just play for us. He wrote an original score for the show accompanied by a digital drum track. This musical addition brought the diverse elements together and became the crowning glory for our production.
In production, our show ran seventy minutes. It was loud, colorful, visually fascinating, and fast-paced. Our audiences reacted to the work in many different ways. For those that knew Shakespeare’s original, the play held a lot of literary value. Most were able to follow the ideas in play, since they had knowledge of the referent upon which it was built. This is, of course, one of the weaknesses of a postmodern deconstruction—it requires knowledge of the work being deconstructed. The students who did not know Shakespeare’s original were lost to the literary reference, but most found the work “cool and exciting.” To quote one student, “I don’t know what that was, but it sure was cool.” Community members, often from an older generation, generally found the work puzzling. Some even found it troubling and godless, an ironic statement considering we had put the gods back in Shakespeare’s godless play. As for us—director, designers, actors, musicians, and technicians—we are extremely pleased and satisfied at the creative venture that Lear ReLoaded was for us. It is our hope that you will find this work, as we have shared it in this photo book, as exciting and enjoyable as we have found it to be.
Scot Lahaie
January 2008
(From the Introduction of the Photobook)