Summary 
Robert Falls crafts an extraordinary King Lear with Stacy Keach at its core as a debauched Euro-trash dictator within a self-poisoned political quagmire. An epic vision, relentlessly harrowing and vulgar, with copious amounts of nudity, sex and graphic violence. More a scathing social criticism than a typical contemporary drama, ambitiously reaching beyond familial character study to social commentary of monumental scope. A resounding theatrical triumph.
Design
Directed by Robert Falls. Set by Walt Spangler. Costumes by Ana Kuzmanic. Lights by Michael Philippi. Sound by Richard Woodbury. Fights by Rick Sordelet.
Cast
Steve Pickering (Kent), Edward Gero (Gloucester), Jonno Roberts (Edmund), Stacy Keach (Lear), Kim Martin-Cotten (Goneril), Kate Arrington (Regan), Laura Odeh (Coredlia), Kevin Gudahl (Albany), Chris Genebach (Cornwall), Joaquin Torres (Edgar), Howard Witt (Fool).
Analysis
Robert Falls celebrates his twentieth season as Goodman Theatre's artistic director with a King Lear of monumental scope - shockingly filled with nudity and sex and graphic violence - that depicts and condemns the misguided political chaos and moral bankruptcy of a modern Eastern European dictatorship. With film and television veteran Stacy Keach portraying Lear as an about-to-retire tyrant who resembles a bloated Mafia don, Falls' relentless vision is harrowing and vulgar, far more a scathing social criticism on a towering scale than a typical Shakespearean drama.
Falls assaults the audience even as it enters the Albert theatre at the Goodman, confronting them with a row of stained ceramic urinals beneath florescent tube lighting in a filthy modern men's tiled bathroom at downstage left. A poisoned tone is set from before the beginning, and the production starts as Kent and Gloucester enter and converse while relieving themselves. The stage then opens upon a massive banquet hall for the ball room celebration of King Lear's retirement, flanked by tall doors and golden-sheeted tower-like columns that soar to the fly, dwarfing the cast of twenty-nine onstage. The characters are small, both literally and figuratively, ethically debauched pawns within a wider world of anarchy and indecency. Lear's sordid court - dressed in a spectrum from slutty club attire to evening gowns, from leather jackets to conservative business suits - dance on tables, swill liquor, smoke cigars and cigarettes, and wave automatic rifles, while black-suited guards watch silently from upstage. Behind high-backed chairs at clusters of small tables, Goneril's lover Oswald is a gold-chained, baseball-capped, warm-up-suited hip-hop disk jockey mixing white-boy dance tunes and crooning in Serbian. A massive framed portrait of a younger, leaner Keach as Lear hangs high above the stage, a winking testament to Keach's Hollywood notoriety and celebrity.
Some Chicago theatre reviewers pointed to the Serbia-Bosnia conflict of the early 1990s as inspiration for Falls' tableau, some going so far as to see Keach's Lear as a depiction of Slobodan Milosevic or Nicolae Ceausescu. Keach's Lear, in a powder-blue power suit and tie - and with full head of snowy white hair and a neatly trimmed white beard - revels in the attention as a hand-held microphone is passed from person to person for gushing testimonials as if at a wedding reception. Lear carves with a knife into an enormous cake shaped like Eastern Europe - with icing mounded into mountains - to divide his kingdom among his fawning daughters. Dissipated and blustering, he clutches at his chest while trying to dance with the same mania as his retinue.
Keach plays a superb Lear, degenerating from bloated dictator to confused but vitriolic outcast in vest and tie, shunned by his daughters and their husbands. Later, he descends to a muttering garbage picker shoving a shopping cart among the ruins of his war-ravaged countryside, then to a white-shirted and ski-capped crazy man roaring on the heath and dancing an Eastern European jig with the Fool - in white-face make-up and long black frock - Kent, and Edgar. Keach's Lear finally strips away all his clothing, exposing himself naked to the thunder and lightning storm, and after a touching reunion with the equally humbled - and blinded - Gloucester, he returns for the conclusion within a wheelchair.
Falls, with Keach anchoring the production, reaches beyond the familial drama and character examination to searing social commentary and criticism, crafting a resounding theatrical triumph. Lear blazes into the gated villa of Goneril's estate with his gun-toting entourage resembling riot policemen, and when he is banished into the bombed out war zone that is of his own making, he finds himself among the rubble, dwarfed by the girders of the first-act gilded towers that are now like twisted steelwork skeletons post 9/11. Wrecked automobiles lie on their sides in the modern wasteland, some with smashed windshields. Falls ingeniously takes all the dramatic pieces from Shakespeare's tragedy - such as the elemental storm Lear confronts - and pushes each one theatrically to the edge and then over, like the breathtaking storm featuring strobe-lit lightning and rain that falls three stories from the fly onto the stage.
In Falls' conception, King Lear's characters at the banquet scene are revealed as not so much celebratory as they are debauched: Cornwall is a hard-edged thug become dangerous on hard drugs; the mild Edgar is a pill-popping spoiled rich kid; Goneril swigs liquor so fast it spills down her chin; and a drunken Gloucester smashes a vodka bottle over his own head. Later, Regan - a trashy Paris Hilton celebrity heiress look-alike in expensive lingerie - arrives with her drug-fueled party posse in a Mercedes-Benz driven right onstage. The luxury car billows with cigar and marijuana smoke, and when Oswald is thrown onto it by an enraged Lear, the car alarm trips blaringly.
The characters in Falls' milieu are not so much sexually self-indulgent as they are perverted: Lear carnally gropes his daughter Regan during the retirement celebration, and Goneril - a comic-book villainess who sensually stares at men in the banquet hall and arrives dragging a fur coat behind her - is soon given anonymous oral sex beneath her fur. Later, in a particularly disturbing depiction of domesticity gone horribly wrong, Goneril is raped from behind by her fuddy-duddy nerd husband Albany, who must spit on his hand for lubrication.
Falls' characters are not so much brutal as they are sadistic: the child of sin Edmund garrotes Cornwall to death in an excruciatingly drawn out scene with graphic kicks and squirms from Cornwall, and Kent - returning from exile with his military commander uniform abandoned for the combat-booted attire of a skinhead punk - threatens a steward with sodomy via a tire iron, but is bound with duct tape, stuffed within spare tires and doused with gasoline for a gangland-style execution. Ensuing scenes are increasingly graphic and disturbing: Gloucester has one eye gouged out and popped into a sizzling frying pan within an expansive stainless steel kitchen, and the other eye is force-fed to him; and Goneril suffocates Regan within a plastic bag in another painfully drawn-out sequence replete with convulsions and violent kicking, then shoots herself under the chin with a pistol. Finally, the diminutive Cordelia, plainly attired in jeans and a pageboy hairstyle during the beginning banquet, is returned to the stage by Lear for the conclusion ("Howl! Howl! Howl!") completely naked, badly bruised, and obviously raped, with a thick leather belt twisted around her neck.
Falls' muscular vision is not so much grim as it is nihilistic. The production's most memorable scene is a lengthy, silent interlude that reveals the enormous price of political hubris and moral bankruptcy. Rural village women in black and field medics in white carry and drag dozens of plastic-wrapped wartime dead across the stage. They move with quiet respect and enormous grief to slide, drop and throw the shrouded corpses into a mass grave. Pointedly, the last to be interred is the recognizable form of Gloucester.
Falls' King Lear is not so much a familial tragedy or a dramatic study of a fading King as it is a powerhouse political epic of monumental proportions, harrowing in its depictions, audaciously staged with visual ferocity, and expertly performed, with a titanic Lear at its center.