Queen Lear

Writer and producer Ronnie Dorsey’s new play, an all-female three-hander, dips into the same deep thematic pool as Virginia Woolf’s musings on Shakespeare’s sister. She focuses on one of the many silent female figures whose presence is only implied, marked by their absence in his works.

Here, Dorsey gives a voice to Lear’s wife, attended by her nurse (Jane Goddard) and counselled by a friar (Mary McCusker) as she suffers the final throes of a pregnancy that is killing her. There are shades of Henry VIII in the tyrannical, never-seen king’s obsession with a male heir.

From the friar’s secret—she has disguised herself as a man in order to follow her vocation—to Queen Lear’s utter subjugation to her husband’s desires, Dorsey explores the limited and pitiless lot of her female characters. And her recasting of Cordelia as Goneril and Regan’s half sister is an intriguing spin on that fraught relationship.

Director Mark Leipacher frames his production like a triptych painting, with the three actresses freezing in place—sometimes with their backs to us—as Queen Lear (Alice Allemano) recalls her idyllic childhood before she was swept into court by her monstrous, abusive husband.

However, the painting analogy is apt: this is a dramatically static production, coming across as a side-note to Shakespeare. Dorsey’s writing is often lyrically beautiful, with memory captured by some vivid imagery, but theatre takes second place to poetry. This production never escapes the feeling of being just a piece of verse put on stage.