The Theater: Tameness Is All

KING LEAR by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

James Earl Jones seems to know a good deal about kingship but very little about old age. His King Lear at the New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park has a certain grandeur in the early portions of the work, a ground base of reasonable outrage over the lèse-majesté of his elder daughters. Yet the eccentricities of age—the sudden frets and pets, the false starts, queer hesitations and erratic humors of senility—are only rarely present.

As a result, Lear's descent into madness after Goneril (Rosalind Cash) and Regan (Ellen Holly) turn him out of the very houses he gave them is distressingly smooth, almost melodramatic. Jones never touches the universal and timeless fears of generational revolt that are implicit in the play. Indeed, much of the time his work seems more elocutionary than emotional. He relies too heavily on wowing the audience with his rich, supple voice.

Director Edwin Sherin's stage movement is brisk and effective, but there is no wildness in it, no sense of irrational forces fiercely at play. Among the rest of the cast, only Rene Auberjonois as Edgar rises above rep company competence. In his mad scenes he finds and illuminates the heart of the darkness Shakespeare was trying to penetrate. If his fellows had his verve and imagination, this Lear might have been more than just another turn by a gifted, but perhaps overly ambitious, star.