The truly stunning element in Oakland Theater Project’s “King Lear” — for some, Shakespeare’s most heart-wrenching play — is one character: the Fool. It’s brilliant that director (and OTP co-founder/co-artistic director) Michael Socrates Moran cast actor-composer-singer and longtime Bay Area performing artist Rinde Eckert in the key role. Seated, initially, half naked on the stage (which is essentially a huge sandbox) in a black fedora, his eyes masked at times by a bandage (very Beckettish), often motionless but seeming to hear messages from the beyond, he is riveting.
And how equally brilliant that Eckert’s sometime collaborator, composer Paul Dresher, provides live music onstage with Joel Davel that transforms the Fool’s snarky-wise commentary into song.
In a play most often seen with the king as the central focus, it’s lovely to highlight the play’s wittiest, most poetic character.
Of course, it’s the king whose faux pas sets the plot in motion when he informs his three daughters that, being old, he is dividing his kingdom into three sections in advance of his demise. When he asks each to articulate her love for him, and his beloved youngest Cordelia, played by Dina Zarif dressed in puritanical white (the colorful, varied costumes are by Denise F. Altaffer), declines to shower him with empty praise, he flies into a rage. He banishes her and generally upsets the entire court’s equilibrium.
This “Lear” has an amusing contemporary flair. Some servants are snorting cocaine, and modern gadgets are among the props. It’s also a huge-cast show that’s very loud if not always clarion-clear in the actors’ Shakespearean speech. There are 25 performers not counting the musicians. Many form a sort of chorus of courtiers; others are Indian monks lurking about (Hindu motifs proliferate throughout. Dresher’s compositions are influenced by Indonesian music.)
The set by Sam Fehr includes live projections of the onstage activity as well as other scenes, with an eclipsed sun as a central motif. “These late eclipses of the sun and moon/Portend no good to us,” comments Lear, prophetically. There’s lot going on all the time.
Edmund — the bad-boy bastard son of the loyal Duke of Gloucester (the always wonderful David Sinaiko) — is played here, quite brilliantly, by gangly Dean Linnard, as a hilariously clownish figure rather than a truly evil one.
Some characterizations don’t work as well as Linnard’s, though — such as the king’s two ungrateful, one-note, screeching daughters.
But most egregious, this Lear (played by J Jha) gives himself nowhere to go emotionally. In a grating, thunderous voice, he begins to rant and roar so early on, and is so lacking in subtlety or nuance throughout, it’s impossible to feel compassion for him. Even when he’s presumably at his most vulnerable, cradling the dead Cordelia in his arms, his sobbing sounds fake.
Of course, there are plenty of other characters to care about. Among them is the loyal Edgar, who ends up wandering around the heath as a madman, played with deep sympathy by Tyler Aguallo.
But as far as stirring our compassion for the “fond, foolish old man” whose downfall we watch for three hours, it’s not the king but rather the Fool’s eerie insight and sharp tongue — and his placid face and the haunting melodies he sings — that register most strongly.
Oakland Theater Project’s “King Lear” continues through Oct. 11 at Z Space’s Steindler Stage, 450 Florida St., San Francisco. Tickets are $10 to 100 at oaklandtheaterproject.org.
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