Stepping outdoors.

Byline: Review By Paul Denison The Register-Guard

ASHLAND - Although "King Lear" is a tragedy in which three women play key roles, the strength of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's new production comes from three men: the playwright, director James Edmondson and actor Kenneth Albers.

Shakepeare did his bit 400 years ago, when he wrote this timeless tragedy about a royal family having its ups and downs: love, trust, greed, bitterness, sibling rivalry, treachery, compassion, cruelty, lunacy, suicide, murder. Edmondson has played Lear himself and has appeared in three other festival productions of this play. Albers is in the title role for the first time.

That their collaboration has been fruitful is evident in the very first scene. Standing astride a map of his kingdom, which he is about to parcel out to his three daughters, using a sword as a pointer, Lear momentarily seems confused, as if he has forgotten which end of the map is which.

Then he tosses the sword aside, steps back up to his throne and demands that each of his daughters tell how much she loves him.

In less than a minute, Albers shows us both a king in command and an old man who is losing his grip. It's a small touch, promising much, and Albers delivers all the way to the sad end.

Lear's two elder daughters, Goneril and Regan, hypocritically play the "How do I love thee?" game with ease. Honest Cordelia, the youngest and dearest, refuses to play along.

Puzzled, then hurt, then enraged, Lear condemns and disowns Cordelia, tells her sisters they can split her share of the kingdom and gives her in marriage to the king of France, the only suitor who will take her without a dowry.

When the Earl of Kent upbraids the king for mistreating Cordelia, Lear banishes him as well.

Having turned himself into a lame duck and lost his two most loyal subjects without giving up his title, Lear quickly finds that life is not all beer and skittles. Goneril and Regan resent the cost of housing and feeding their father and his retinue. They fear he will turn on them as he turned on Cordelia. So they turn against him.

Meanwhile, Edmund, the earl of Gloucester's bastard son, schemes to discredit Edgar, his legitimate brother, and steal his inheritance. To save himself from his father's wrath, Edgar runs away and disguises himself as a madman.

The father-daughters line and the father-sons line run parallel for a time and then interwine, as Edmund hooks up with Regan and her husband and with Goneril, and both women have the hots for the villain. What a soap opera this could have been!

And toward the end, so many people die in quick succession that "King Lear" almost falls over the cliff into "Titus Andronicus."

But Edmondson, Albers and the rest of the cast keep everything on track and deliver what Shakespeare intended, a powerful and poignant study of an old man and his family coming apart at the seams.

Albers' performance is a tour de force. His voice is strong but supple, capable of ringing declaration and of subtle nuance. His diction is perfectly clear, his speech both noble and natural.

Albers handles Lear's deterioration - his mood swings between lunacy, lucidity, befuddlement, rage, self-pity, compassion, tenderness and howling grief - with all the convincing skill of a seasoned actor working with a seasoned director.

He makes you care deeply about Lear even when part of your brain is noting that the jerk really brought all this trouble on himself.

As Gloucester, Tony DeBruno does much the same, although not as powerfully as Albers does.

Ray Porter stands out as the Earl of Kent, whose blunt honesty earns him the wrath of a king to whom he is absolutely loyal. Like Albers, Porter speaks Shakespeare's language as if he learned it from his mother. He makes Kent's devotion to the king and his avuncular affection for Cordelia light up the stage.

Kent also has a lot of good lines, including a few sentences that go to the heart of Lear's poignant plight and suggest that Shakespeare could hang out his shingle as a psychologist if he were around today. Asked why Lear will not consent to see Cordelia, now the queen of France, Kent replies:

``A sovereign shame so elbows him; his own unkindness, that stripped her of his benediction, turned her to foreign casualties, gave her dear rights to his dog-hearted daughters - these things sting his mind so venomously that that burning shame detains him from Cordelia.''

On the darker side, Jos Viramontes is effective as the villainous Edmund but could have played the role with a meaner edge. The same is true of Maya Thomas as Goneril. She seems strong but a bit too placid.

Early on, Catherine Lynn Davis seems a bit self-conscious about her lines; but she later shows us the depth of Regan's spite, and of her cruelty, when she and her husband tear out Gloucester's eyes, and she stabs in the back one of Gloucteser's servants who has just mortally wounded her husband.

In terms of stage time, the role of Cordelia is small, and Julie Oda isn't able to do much with it. Robert Vincent Frank clearly communicates the bitterness that Lear's Fool feels after the king mistreats Cordelia, but he is very hard to understand.

Gregory Linington fares better with his diction as Edgar playing mad Tom and as just Edgar, who finally finds a way to avenge his father and put things right.

Although it had a political context in Shakespeare's day and even has some political relevance today, "King Lear" is at heart a drama about a smaller, more intimate kingdom: the family, where love should govern all but often does not, and many wounds are bloodless.

CAPTION(S):

Kenneth Albers (top) is King Lear and Tony DeBruno is Gloucester, two tormented fathers, in a powerful production of William Shakespeare's tragedy. It is now playing at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. The summer season has begun at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. Today we review the three plays that opened this past weekend on the festival's outdoor stage, along with two that opened earlier this spring.