Anniversary! Where's the Waltz?

It turns out that our Wedding Anniversary, Kate and I that is, falls on Mothers Day. That’s handy as we are both AARP in the key forgetting syndrome. Not a good choice but we ended up watching Derrick Jacoby play King Lear in downtown Brooklyn at the Harvey Theatre. Lear is hardly a celebrates play to see on a wedding anniversary. Jacoby is a wonderful Lear. The whole cast did their work well.

The play ended with a audience that just jumped out of their seats and this writer screaming Bravo, bravo bravo. I just love theater people who can make me do that. As we walked a few blocks to the restaurant for dinner a severe pain was developing in my right foot, I do suffer from Neuropathy but somehow this was different. It was becoming increasingly severe.

I began to think, this pain is a result of this play. Lear is a strange story of a group of people all living without love. Lear, the needy father, is distributing his land wealth to his daughters. Reagan, Goneril and Cordelia. But he does it based and how they are able to describe their love of him. Regan and Goneril get their share of land holdings. Cordelia who wanted her fathers love gets nothing. As Lear says, “nothing comes from nothing.” She gets nothing while her evil sisters get it all.

With the landholdings comes power. Regan and Goneril have men besides them who also have one interest, power. Once Lear has given up his throne his two daughters turn him to dust. Without his Kingly powers he goes mad. His friend Gloucester has his eyes torn out by a betraying son. There simply are no redeeming characters in this play. This was in 1605. Do we have similar contemporaries?

As we walked and my pain kept increasing I suddenly;y became aware that my oncoming pain was not neuropathy but Gout. The kings disease. Now that was a perfect fit for this Shakespeare play. I would add, there simply are no heroes in this drama. All the players except Cordelia seem to be devoid of love especially Lear. Yes he wants his daughters to love him but he doesn’t seem to know enough of himself to love anyone. We meet him in his almost childlike old age when his life is fading. It is at his end that he longs for some love from his daughters and loyalty from friends. He gets neither and sinks into an abyss of loss and death.

Upon Cordelia’s murder Lear leaves out a spine tingling scream. I first heard that from Laurence Olivier who described it as hearing trapped animals screaming in a near bye woods. For me that outcry has always touched me as our weeping for the the human condition. The VietNam child screaming with agent orange covering her body. The Kent State students eyes on the Soldiers gun. Slavery, the Holocaust, the Gulag, on and on..
When Lear says, ”When we are born, we cry that we are come To this great stage of fools.” Doesn’t that say it all? How did Shakespeare come to know so much about the human condition?

“Kate, how the hell did I ever pick this play for an Anniversary Waltz? No love, no caring, no loyalty, no reassurance. That's not our life. Yes we live on this stage of great fools. We try real hard to carve out our little space of love and caring. It’s not easy. Like so many others, we just keep trying.

PS. Unlike Shakespeare’s Kings, thanks to modern medicine my gout is under control. Next year we will seek out a place to waltz around or go see Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing.”