A KINGDOM OF VOICES

by Montserrat Mendez

King Lear
By William Shakespeare
Compagnia de’ Colombari
and La Mama Experimental Theatre Clube
Directed & Adapted by Karin Coonrod
with Original Music by Frank London

TICKETS

I hate Shakespeare tragedies, until I love Shakespeare tragedies. Which is to say, I distrust them for their cruelty, their appetite for ruin, their sometimes smug insistence that suffering is wisdom. And then, abruptly, without warning, one of them opens a trapdoor in my chest and I fall through, grateful and bruised and awake.

King Lear may be Shakespeare’s most hostile play. Hostile to directors, to actors, to audiences, to coherence itself. It refuses to settle into a single governing idea. Any interpretation that claims authority is immediately undermined by the next scene, the next speech, the next brutal reversal. The play keeps asking questions it will not allow anyone to answer, and it punishes certainty with embarrassment. That resistance is not a flaw. It is the point.

The world of Lear is one in which moral and political climates have collapsed into one another. The land is stormy because the people are stormy. Governance has curdled into performance, affection into transaction. Lear begins the play believing power is something that can be divided without consequence, love something that can be demanded and measured aloud. What follows is not simply his punishment, but his education. He learns, too late and at unbearable cost, that authority cannot survive without responsibility, that truth rarely announces itself in the voice of flattery, and that honesty often arrives disguised as cruelty.

Age strips him of the illusions that once protected him. Error compounds error. Recognition comes only after the damage is irreversible. By the time Lear understands what it means to be human, he has been stripped of every structure that once insulated him from that knowledge. What remains is not redemption, exactly, but exposure. A man reduced to weather, to grief, to love unmediated by power. Death, when it comes, does not feel like judgment. It feels like silence after an argument that has gone on far too long.

The story, brutally simple. An old king divides his kingdom among his three daughters, demanding declarations of love as payment. The two who flatter him are rewarded. The one who speaks plainly is banished. Stripped of authority, Lear wanders into madness as his favored daughters turn cruel, the country fractures, and a parallel story unfolds in which another father misjudges another loyal child. Families implode. Eyes are put out. The innocent suffer alongside the guilty. Recognition arrives only after everything worth saving has already been destroyed.

All that remains, stubbornly, is not hope exactly, but witness. The terrible mercy of seeing clearly, at last, what love costs, what power erases, and how late the human animal is always allowed to arrive at wisdom.

What Karin Coonrod does in the first half is something like an act of controlled delirium. It is brilliant, immersive, strange, insistently attention-grabbing, and punishing in the best possible way for the actors who must sustain it. By having King Lear initially embodied by all ten performers, until the play’s social order snaps into focus and the daughters, Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia, assume their fixed gravitational pull, Coonrod accomplishes two things that are at once wildly imaginative and rigorously theatrical.

First, she situates us inside the mind of a mad king. Not madness as spectacle, but madness as condition. As someone who has lived with tinnitus, unceasing, for fourteen years, I recognize this interior state: the constant noise, the refusal of silence, the way the mind begins to organize chaos into voices simply to survive it.

There is a violence in that mental crowding, and a terror. The science tells us that tinnitus correlates with early-onset cognitive decline, but the lived experience is more immediate than data. It is the sensation of being argued with from the inside. Coonrod’s many Lears make that argument audible. The effect is unexpectedly tender. What might have remained a portrait of arrogance curdling into cruelty becomes an empathy machine, granting us access to the psychic pressure under which Lear makes his catastrophic first choice, particularly his brutal banishment of Cordelia.

The multi-Lear conceit is also, unavoidably, a political image tuned precisely to the present moment. Surrounded by Lears, lines ricocheting from body to body, the audience’s attention whips back and forth, struggling to assemble coherence from fragmentation. It is not unlike the experience of living under our own contemporary mad king, whose incoherent edicts appear on Truth Social and then immediately proliferate across Twitter, Threads, Instagram, Facebook, an omnidirectional barrage of grievance, threat, and delusion. Authority no longer speaks once. It echoes, multiplies, and drowns out dissent through sheer repetition.

The sensation is exhilarating, even intoxicating, and also profoundly unsettling. You feel the pleasure of velocity, the adrenaline of being constantly activated. And underneath it, the creeping dread that you are watching yourself doom scroll, helplessly, into catastrophe. This is not just a tragedy unfolding onstage. It is the feeling of recognizing, too late, that you have been rehearsing it every day.

And then something unexpected happens. This same approach loosens my judgment of the sisters, especially Goneril and Regan, who are so often flattened into cartoon villainy, embodiments of ambition without context, cruelty without cause. Here, they read differently. Not redeemed, exactly, but legible. Understandable. Which is rarer, and more unsettling.

Consider what they are forced to navigate: not a single tyrant but a chorus of them. A community of male authority, loud, contradictory, volatile, flung at them from every direction. Power that does not merely command but crowds. Under those conditions, morality is not a luxury afforded equally. What emerges instead is strategy. Theirs becomes a logic of survival. Adapt, or be consumed.

And if you understand yourself to be a lamb already marked for slaughter, there is a terrible clarity in choosing to become a wolf. It is not virtue. It is self-preservation sharpened into teeth.

The multi-Lear conceit makes this socio-political weather palpable. It allows us to feel the pressure system under which these women operate, the atmospheric density of a world where power is unstable, masculine, and omnipresent. Their choices do not excuse their brutality, but they explain its necessity. And explanation, in tragedy, is often the closest thing we get to justice.

I found myself deeply taken by the three sisters in this production, not in the dutiful way one admires competence, but in the way one recognizes necessity. Abigail Killeen’s Goneril feels vitally tethered to the material, a woman not performing power but generating it. There is a sensual intelligence in the way she occupies space, an awareness of her body as argument, as strategy, as proof of life. She does not borrow authority. She manufactures it. Watching her, you understand why resistance hardens into command.

Joe Mei’s Regan, by contrast, is resolutely unreadable, and the refusal itself becomes the performance. She withholds. She observes. She keeps her cards pressed flat against her chest until the play’s violent middle cracks something open, releasing a hunger that feels less like depravity than liberation, the sudden permission of a creature long disciplined into silence. The transformation is disturbing precisely because it feels earned.

And then there is Celeste Sena’s Cordelia, a miracle of grounding and clarity. She is truthful without sanctimony, modern without anachronism. When she refuses her father the speech he demands, it does not read as defiance but as integrity, an ethical line drawn quietly and without flourish. Her banishment lands with a contemporary sting. One cannot help but think how often decency now results in disappearance, how regularly goodness is exiled into irrelevance or shot in the middle of the street while trying to save someone else. The play knows this. Sena knows this. The audience feels it in the gut.

The ensemble as a whole is formidable, but Abigail C. Onwunali’s Edgar demands particular attention. Her voice is an instrument of rare depth and resonance, something felt as much as heard, capable of rattling bone. I want to hear her speak anything, anywhere, for as long as she will allow us the pleasure of that talent. Her scenes with Michael Potts crackle with intelligence and pleasure, two actors meeting the language at full velocity, unafraid of its density, delighted by its danger.

This is why one keeps going back to the theater. For this ferocity. This generosity. Actors who do not protect themselves, who leap rather than measure, who trust the text and each other enough to risk everything. When it works like this, the theater does not merely entertain. It insists.

And this can be said of each and every actor, as they all each earn incredible moments, Julian Elijah Martinez, utterly magnetic. Tom Nelis, heartbreakingly tender. Lukas Papenfusscline,  Leiken, deliciously campy but with a voice of a choir from the Middle Ages. Paul Pryce, relentlessly authoritative. Tony Torn, both ridiculous and striking.

There is also no denying the eroticism of this cast, though not the cheap or merely visual kind. This is not sex appeal as ornament. It is sexiness as intelligence, as appetite. Yes, many of these actors are physically commanding, but what truly seduces is the pleasure they take in the language, the clarity with which they attack some of the most punishing poetry in Shakespeare’s canon. Difficulty becomes an aphrodisiac. You feel their desire to be equal to the words, and that desire is contagious.

Karin Coonrod’s staging reveals a structural intelligence that only clarifies with time. The first half is madness in its generative phase, centrifugal, noisy, intoxicating. The second half is consequence. Wreckage. Fallout. The architecture of cause and effect settles over the play with a moral weight that feels unmistakably contemporary. This is not chaos without reason. This is chaos with a paper trail.

We are watching this dynamic unfold outside the theater as well. Having lost faith in institutions designed to speak with authority, we turn instead to a thousand competing voices, refreshing, scrolling, listening, mistrusting, believing, un-believing, all at once. Mainstream media fails, so we improvise a chorus. And the chorus drives us mad.

We are mad right now. Not metaphorically. Structurally. We inhabit a world that has trained us to fragment attention, to multiply outrage, to mistake noise for truth. In that sense, Coonrod’s Lear does not merely depict madness. It diagnoses it. We are all King Lear now, shouting into the storm we helped create, stunned to discover that the crown, the democracy we have surrendered has not vanished, only shattered, and that every shard is cutting us to pieces. 

The technical work is stunning. Every costume feels alive, a character in its own right, and I want each one of Oana Botez's creation in my possession, or at least one of the, it feels like like America right now over coats.  

Frank London’s music is a haunting horror score for a kingdom in free fall. 

It is a powerful night at the theatre and a stark reminder of what greed and hunger for power continues to do to us.