Compagnia de’ Colombari’s King Lear is a primal, physical and potent “paper crown” Lear that strips the Shakespearian classic to its essence. Adapter and director Karin Coonrod utilizes her signature “multiplicity” to shift and deepen audiences’ connection with the characters. Ten diverse actors ranging in age and gender embody King Lear at the beginning and conduct a radical take-over of the text and space. Their unity fragments as they tear off their paper crowns and transform into other roles, competing for influence and diminishing the legion of Lears by their existence. Through a vigorous exploration of the characters’ egos, motivations and power dynamics, the actors dig deep into the internal and external voyage of a stubborn, fractured soul who must lose everything to find himself. Transformation takes place in the apocalypse. Coonrod’s immersive production commands us to, as Kent says to King Lear, “See better.”
Throughout 2024, Compagnia de’ Colombari is celebrating 20 years of generating spectacle, disrupting and reconstructing texts and spaces under the direction of Karin Coonrod with a robust Anniversary Season. Of Coonrod’s direction, The New York Times proclaimed, “this experimental director has a knack for transforming high concepts into accessible theater” and calls her “a theater artist of far-reaching inventiveness” who uses a “style that deconstructs to construct.”
