Tell me you love me

Linda Falkenstein, Isthmus

King Lear is often considered Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy. Like Hamlet and Macbeth, the play ends with a heap of dead bodies, and like those plays asks the question: What makes a good ruler? Who should be king?

But Lear insistently poses more existential, philosophical questions: What is “natural”? Stripped of our roles in society, what are we?; what makes man more than “nothing”? That complexity, coupled with what is at times a messy plot, can make Lear a challenge. The good news is that American Players Theatre mostly rises to the challenge.

Aging King Lear (Brian Mani, in all his majesty), having no male heirs, decides to divide his kingdom among his three daughters. Who gets how much depends on her answer to his outright demand for flattery: Tell me how much you love me; winner gets the best land. It’s the big mistake that sets the plot in motion.

Daughters Goneril (Nancy Rodriguez) and Regan (Jessica Ko) tell Lear what he wants to hear. Youngest daughter Cordelia (Samantha Newcomb, in a businesslike, unsentimental performance) is measured, telling her father that she can say “nothing,” that she loves him according to her bond, as a daughter should. For her truth-telling she is married off, dowerless, to the king of France — effectively thrown out of the house.

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