King Lear at Hudson Valley Shakespeare

The new theater at Hudson Valley Shakespeare has changed the way I think about theatrical space.

I’d heard about the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival for years, but it was only after reading in the New York Times about its new outdoor performance space that I decided I would go to this year’s two Shakespeare productions, King Lear and As You Like It.

For decades, the company has performed in a tent, but they have now built for themselves a permanent open-sided structure. A roof that looks like a turtle shell covers the audience and stage space, while leaving open a breathtaking view to the north that serves as backdrop to the action.

I’ve been to other outdoor theaters. All of them, even the theaters of ancient Greece, framed the action against some architectural backdrop. What makes this one distinctive is this lack of enclosure behind the stage.

And here’s what makes that design so remarkable. An outdoor space bounded behind the actors suggests that even if the world behind the audience might extend indefinitely, the action we are watching is contained in a particular playing area. At Hudson Valley, by contrast, the audience is limited to the seats under the turtle shell; it’s the playing space that suggests it could run to infinity.

The director of King Lear, in particular, makes effective use of this possibility. The production begins with Lear and an unidentified woman in the distance. She turns away and he strides toward us, to be joined by the company making up the first scene. As she disappears behind a hill, we’re already confronted with loss. Was this his wife?

We don’t get an answer, but the image returns around sunset. As Lear begins to realize his mistake in banishing his favorite daughter, we see Cordelia in the distance, a faint image in the dusk, a double perhaps of another woman he loved and lost.

At first, the jumping on and off the stage and disappearing into the dark can feel a bit random, but I gradually began to feel that these actors have just dropped in from a life elsewhere. I sense that what takes place on the stage is a part of the whole, just a glimpse of a larger, infinitely rich world. And the image of Cordelia—and perhaps Lear’s wife—suggests that the whole is an infinitude of loss.

There’s an irony here. Lear in the first scene is measuring his kingdom, along with the love each daughter feels for him. He draws lines on a map to divide it up according to how convincingly each daughter expresses her devotion. Only afterward did I realize how well this particular space underlines Lear’s pettiness: nothing about this view of hills and river and Storm King Mountain can be meaningfully measured!

Yes, really. As this play about a king and a storm begins, we’re gazing across the river at a mountain called Storm King. The weather was, in fact, quite inappropriately serene for this play. Still, the storm only arrives after darkness has fallen, and the state-of-the-art sound and light system makes it most convincing. When the storm broke, I was certain that it was not just in the theater—no, that whole world I’d been experiencing in the light? I could imagine it all in deadly turmoil.

As Lear rushes out into the night, shedding his clothes as he runs, I felt all boundaries, all the measured lines on a map he had tried to impose, collapse. The boundary between the edge of the stage and the world, between theater and terrifying nature, was gone.