HELLO tell me more abt your lear adaptation i have been eagerly snatching up little bits you talk about on here it seems so interesting
hi mor!! i would love to talk abt it a little more (and maybe it will inspire me to get a little more work done on it)
my google doc is jokingly titled 'lear but no lear' rn but i still need to find a good line pull to name it.... Anyway as you may surmise from the title i am attempting to devise a script that contains the same plot without actually having lear appear. (it's sort of started as an excuse for me, a 21 year old, to direct/work on king lear with actors that are my age but i do actually think the concept is solid)
so the only characters are the children - goneril, regan, cordelia, edgar, and edmund. i'm interested in exploring the effect of lear and gloucester on their children as an unseen force that influences every moment of the play without being a physical presence. also those five make me fucking. crazy and i want to dig into their potential in more depth. there's a lot of siblings speaking with their parents voices to each other to emphasize that theme of familial legacy/influence.
i'm rolling cornwall and albany into edmund's character (by which i mean he's taking most of their lines/positioning and has some sort of preexisting relationship with them) which is going to make for an interesting shift in his relationships with goneril and regan. cordelia is also doubling as the fool so she has a more active engagement in the storytelling (which means she also gets to sing! if i'm a sucker for anything it's music in plays). everyone sort of steps in and out of other character's voices as necessary, and it's probably going to end up being fairly abstract and experimental.
i'm producing it twice with two different casts in november and january (the first one is much more a workshop to see if i can get it to work at all bc both have insanely tight rehearsal timelines) and i feel soo fucking lucky to get to work with the casts i have, i trust them so completely to help me shape it. it is definitely a departure from my usual work bc it Requires that i make decisions that are unfaithful to the original text/change the story, but i'm hoping i'll be able to push past that to end up with something that makes sense!
