Talk to anyone who has ever been to Hudson Valley Shakespeare and you’ll probably hear first about the weather. That’s not a knock on the company’s acting, nor on the productions. But for decades the troupe performed in a tent high on a hilltop near Garrison, N.Y.; and, starting this year, they act in an open-air venue overlooking the Hudson River. Seeing a play backed by such a ravishing view turns everyone into a meteorologist, reading portents in the shifts of sun and cloud.
At the elegant, newly opened Samuel H. Scripps Theater Center, a floating bentwood roof hangs over the audience and the stage, but the playing space has no rear wall. Beyond the covered performance area we see a pristine circle of lawn, and, beyond that, a vista of blue hills kneeling down to the river. When I was in Garrison for two nights to see “As You Like It” and “King Lear,” which are being performed in repertory, the weather was disappointingly exquisite. I had hoped for a real storm for “Lear,” but I made do with two stunning sunsets — a red one for the comedy, the other a weird pale green.
If you can only go for one of the two Shakespeares, then I would pick “King Lear.” (The “As You Like It,” directed by Miriam Laube, capers delightfully but never quite nails the romance.) In “Lear,” though, the company’s artistic director, Davis McCallum, has directed a beautifully observed account of a man’s final act, one that also manages to engage the surrounding mountains in conversation.
Kurt Rhoads, a Hudson Valley stalwart, plays the graybeard king, divvying up his kingdom based on which of his three daughters says she loves him most. Lear’s youngest daughter, Cordelia (Melissa Mahoney), adores him but can’t convince him of it. In her rather coolly phrased tribute — “I love your Majesty / According to my bond” — we first hear the slippage between word and thought that will eventually drive Lear mad.
Rhoads is tremendous at playing Lear in decline, perhaps because he’s so good at playing Lear at full strength. His big white beard gives him a jolly quality at first; Lear, freed from the constraints of ruling, rollicks with his soldiers, including his disguised courtier Kent (the excellent, searching Zack Fine). Disoriented by his older daughters’ sudden shift to condescension and contempt, Lear laughs louder than his men to cover up his confusion. Did anyone ever respect him? Everyone said they did. You watch him puzzling over the contradiction — and then losing his mind at the answer.
“King Lear” contains plenty of death and betrayal and sorrow, but the most piercing exchange in this production comes quite early, in Act I, when a still-sane Lear is listening with half an ear to his loyal Fool (Nance Williamson). The Fool asks one of his interminable riddles — “Thou canst tell why one’s nose stands i’ th’ middle on’s face?” — and Lear answers him graciously, keeping his assigned place in the joke. Rhoads invests his simple “no” to the Fool with both deep affection and a kindly air of distraction. Lear has just begun to realize the great mistake he’s made in rejecting Cordelia, and his mind is reeling. Still, he plays along rather than ignore an old friend. It’s the only largess he has left to give.
In a mirror plot to Lear’s, the Earl of Gloucester (Howard W. Overshown) trusts wrongly too — he chooses to believe his wicked son, Edmund (Keshav Moodliar), over the good son, Edgar (Eric Berryman). Moodliar and Berryman also play brothers at odds in “As You Like It,” and in both productions Berryman uses his weary gravitas to ground the play. As the moral Edgar in “King Lear,” he’s the philosophical still-point; as the baddish guy Oliver in “As You Like It,” he’s the only adult in a world of emotional teenagers. (His Oliver also gets to fall in love with Safiya Harris’s marvelous Celia, who seems smarter in this version than every other character combined.)
Moodliar is Orlando, an outcast who befriends a young man he meets in the Forest of Arden. This “shepherd” with a cameo profile is, of course, actually his disguised beloved, the noblewoman Rosalind (Helen Cespedes), hiding in sylvan exile. While I did have concerns about “As You Like It” — Laube incorporates new songs by Amanda Dehnert that fit awkwardly — there are pleasures to be found in the way the two shows interact. In “King Lear,” for example, Cespedes also plays one of Lear’s vicious daughters, Regan. That double-casting made me think twice about Rosalind’s mean-girl tendencies. Ugh, she can totally be such a Regan.
McCallum has spoken about pairing these plays for the Scripps Theater’s inaugural summer as a gesture to their shared themes: In both, characters go into unaccommodated nature and find the truth of themselves. I’m not sure I’d call Hudson Valley Shakespeare’s lovely 98 acres that sort of nature. It’s so charmingly landscaped (a sweet duck pond below the parking lot; fairy-lights twinkling in the trees) that the place is more a garden than a wilderness. But it still does something to you. The belvedere setting slows your thinking down to the deliberate pace of a sun dropping … dropping …. dropping … out of sight.
There is plenty of outdoor Shakespeare in the summer; many of us do not, actually, have to go all the way to Garrison to find it. But I would still recommend it. Not only has the Hudson Valley Shakespeare company dedicated itself to creating its own kind of Forest of Arden — you sense utopian dreaming in every seedling on this new campus — but experiencing its approach to theater will be a restorative pilgrimage for anyone who can get there.
I think the effect has to do with how these productions relate to the horizon and the stage. During their best moments, the far-off landscape becomes something more than a pretty backdrop. We’re encouraged to move our attention between the characters and the mountains, between humanity and the earth’s huge granite shoulders, shrugging silently in the distance.
McCallum’s “King Lear” provides one of those perspective shifts in a wordless opening sequence, during which the widower king loses his queen, a woman that Shakespeare’s text never mentions. As Rhoads first strides into the stage space from outside, a robed female figure stays behind at the edge of the greensward, gazing at the dreaming river. Right at the end of the show, we think back on this image as a kind of solace. Lear endures terrible trials, and he loses everything, including his life. Still, McCallum’s staging suggests, he will at least then join his queen. That initial sequence showed us what death looks like. And if we’ve learned anything at all while watching this gorgeous show, it’s that a soul could happily look out at that valley forever.
As You Like It
Through Sept. 17 at Hudson Valley Shakespeare, Garrison; hvshakespeare.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.
King Lear
Through Sept. 18 at Hudson Valley Shakespeare, Garrison; hvshakespeare.org. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes.
