What do you get when you combine Shakespeare, Glenda Jackson, and Broadway? Possibly one of the best theatrical productions of the year. That’s the hope, anyway, for director Sam Gold’s “King Lear” revival, which opens April 4 at the Cort Theatre.
His lead actor is as much a stranger to Lear as Shakespeare is to Broadway—which is to say they’re all well acquainted; Jackson just played Shakespeare’s tragic titular royal in a 2016 West End production, marking her return to the stage after a 25-year break from acting and a career in politics. And while Broadway hasn’t seen the Bard in a few years, the 2013–2014 season alone saw productions of “Macbeth,” “Romeo and Juliet,” and a joint run of “Twelfth Night” and “Richard III.”
Gold, a Tony winner for “Fun Home” and nominee for “A Doll’s House, Part 2,” says “Lear” is just the latest of the Shakespearean tragedies he hopes to stage on Broadway. “I really want to do all the great tragedies. They’re, to me, the most challenging and beautiful experiences to have in the theater,” he tells Backstage on a break during rehearsals. “To give a modern audience a clear interpretation of a play that reaches such enormous heights—it’s the Everest, and the challenge of that has really excited me.” (He has previously staged “Othello” and “Hamlet” Off-Broadway.)
READ: The Beginner’s Guide to Shakespeare
While Gold missed Jackson’s performance at the Old Vic in London, he assures that the Oscar and Tony winner’s take on the text will be “entirely new” this time. “She has an amazing attitude about it, which is that this part is endless to explore and doing it once made [her] want to keep exploring it,” he says, adding that Jackson “is the only actor I can think of, living, who can bring the power, intensity, royalty, cruelty, and vulnerability of this part.” That’s quite the claim, but speaking for those who saw her ferocious turn just last season in Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women,” we’re inclined to agree.
Part of the reason Gold tapped Jackson for the gender-flipped role is her ability to be an unrelentingly truthful performer. “I think I have a pretty good bullshit detector,” he says. “When I love an actor, it’s because when I’m working with them, that detector never goes off—[it’s] someone who is just speaking the truth and making it their own.” The same can be said, then, for his formidable ensemble, among them Jayne Houdyshell, Elizabeth Marvel, Pedro Pascal, and Ruth Wilson.
While Gold equates the Shakespearean tragedies to Mount Everest for himself, he also needs performers of a certain caliber and knowledge to see them through. For actors new to such texts, he advises consciously taking on Shakespeare’s various demands. The first job is to learn the piece technically.
“[You’re] learning a new language,” Gold says. “It’s a different language than contemporary English; it has its own rhythm, and you have to be able to perfectly translate that language into your own understanding.” He cites the moment when learning a foreign language that one moves from translating the text into their own language to speaking it fluently. “You have to get to that point with Shakespeare.”
The second job for an actor performing Shakespeare is to practice emotional presence, “which is equally important but very different. Find the truth of the present-tense moment onstage. You have to be open and available to that present moment while simultaneously doing something very technical, and those two things together can often be very hard to do simultaneously. That, to me, is when you see Shakespeare really come alive.”
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