Between performing as LaFew in All’s Well That Ends Well in Founders’ Theatre, directing Wild and Whirling Words on the Rose Footprint, and teaching acting students in the Summer Training Institute down at the Production and Performing Arts Center, Dennis Krausnick, director of training, even when obliged to be everywhere at every moment, still has time to pursue a personal project. Miraculously, he was able to find five minutes to talk to us about it.
The Lear Project is a solo play in which Dennis takes the audience on a journey through Shakespeare’s King Lear, performing the King’s speeches and exploring his personal relationship to the play and its themes of parent-child relationships from his own roles as son, step-father, and mentor to myriad young acting students.
Dennis is performing the work next month (August 12th at 8:30pm, $20 suggested donation—call 413.637.3353 or buy tickets now online) in the Production and Performing Arts Center, after almost a decade of gestation and workshops. You might say that Dennis is entering a “Lear period”, given that in addition to picking up speed on his Lear Project, he has also been invited to play King Lear in Shakespeare’s play at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC next Spring, with more potential offers to play the role beyond that.
His fascination with the play began ten years ago, when Dennis directed King Lear at Shakespeare & Company in a production that excised most of the subplots to focus squarely on the parent-child relationship at the heart of the play (and which starred Olympia Dukakis as the King, with Tina Packer as the Fool). It was with this production that he first became hooked into the idea of looking at the play through this family lens and his preoccupation with the story began.
“I can’t help reflecting on my own life-relationships as I delve into the text,” Dennis says. “The complexity of my own relationships with my parents who were very powerful presences in my early life. In The Lear Project, I walk the audience through the story of the play, the relationships, as well as the resonances that they awaken in my own life with the generation before me who have now passed on and with those coming in the next generation…who may well be waiting for me to get out of the way. It has resonances in my personal life, my work relationships and with all those young actors I’ve been teaching to perform Shakespeare for the past twenty or more years.”
Aspiring Shakespeare scholars among us may know that two versions of King Lear have survived the centuries: a 1608 quarto and the 1623 First Folio version. With a few hundred lines in each that are not present in the other, the plays have come to be considered by scholars as two separate plays: the quarto a less sophisticated play focusing on political themes, the Folio exploring the realm of family struggle. It is the Folio version, of course, in which Dennis is interested (directors, he thinks, would do better to choose one version or the other to direct instead of choosing the best bits of poetry from each to create a mash-up text, as is the common practice).
Dennis is using the opportunity of the increased presence of the play in his life by exploring this academic question in an upcoming Training workshop titled “Dual”-ing Lears: Text In Performance, in which he plans to explore the questions of editorship and performance the two plays inspire. “Participants will get a lot of exciting detailed information about the gathering and printing of Shakespeare’s early texts,” says Dennis, “and how that affects what we see on stage today or read in an edition of the play.” (Enrollment in this workshop for participants and auditors is still open, click here for more info.)
0 Response to “Dennis Krausnick’s “The Lear Project””