Stu wrote this essay on why he decided to play Lear. I found it very useful for my own inspiration and would refer back to it often when I needed to be reminded why I was making this film.
My playing Lear happened as a result of several decisions and conditions.
At first, when we thought about this project it seemed relatively easy. We would do three scenes, interview people we respected who were growing old and have them respond to the scenes we portrayed, alternating the interviews and scenes using overlaid questions as a narrative to unite the piece. The more we did this, the more incoherent, and pedantic the results seemed.
And even as simple as the idea was, the thinness of our original budget seemed to tell us we could not accomplish even this goal. We wanted a valuable and dramatic provocative piece and this was not it.
Then as we put together our small acting company of five we realized that the story we wanted to tell was contained in the lives of the actors themselves. All but one were middle aged or older, all finding themselves dealing in their own ways and lives with the issues of aging and family. The relevance we were looking for was them.
I was semi-retired, having just turned sixty seven, having just experienced a bout of a semi serious illness that comes mostly with age and with the growing need and pressures to help my wife take care of her aging mother. Another member of the cast was caring for his 96 year old mother and still another was trying to move her father from one nursing facility to a better one and along the way becoming an expert on the health system in America for the elderly.
As a teacher of Shakespeare, I had always insisted with my students that the only way for them to really even begin to know a character was to inhabit him or her, making an honest effort to discover what the character was feeling by speaking and feeling the words, the emotions evoked by those words and the physical actions compelled by them.
I needed to heed my own advice. If we were to make an honest and hopefully helpful film we would make a documentary drama that intertwined the lives of our actors as people, artists and the questions raised by this great play that touched on aging, decision making and the impact of these on family and friends.
Too, I would have to make a big leap of faith and take on myself the role of Lear. I had acted and directed my whole career, but had never done any role that even approached him. There isn’t any. It took my colleague in this project, Maurice O’Sullivan, to convince me to try. And, of course, as with all under funded arts projects by my doing this, assuming I could do so successfully, we would save the salary we’d budgeted for the role and use the funds for something else. And we would have to raise more funding.
It was a huge gamble. But at 67 when would I ever have an opportunity like this again?
My playing Lear happened as a result of several decisions and conditions.
At first, when we thought about this project it seemed relatively easy. We would do three scenes, interview people we respected who were growing old and have them respond to the scenes we portrayed, alternating the interviews and scenes using overlaid questions as a narrative to unite the piece. The more we did this, the more incoherent, and pedantic the results seemed.
And even as simple as the idea was, the thinness of our original budget seemed to tell us we could not accomplish even this goal. We wanted a valuable and dramatic provocative piece and this was not it.
Then as we put together our small acting company of five we realized that the story we wanted to tell was contained in the lives of the actors themselves. All but one were middle aged or older, all finding themselves dealing in their own ways and lives with the issues of aging and family. The relevance we were looking for was them.
I was semi-retired, having just turned sixty seven, having just experienced a bout of a semi serious illness that comes mostly with age and with the growing need and pressures to help my wife take care of her aging mother. Another member of the cast was caring for his 96 year old mother and still another was trying to move her father from one nursing facility to a better one and along the way becoming an expert on the health system in America for the elderly.
As a teacher of Shakespeare, I had always insisted with my students that the only way for them to really even begin to know a character was to inhabit him or her, making an honest effort to discover what the character was feeling by speaking and feeling the words, the emotions evoked by those words and the physical actions compelled by them.
I needed to heed my own advice. If we were to make an honest and hopefully helpful film we would make a documentary drama that intertwined the lives of our actors as people, artists and the questions raised by this great play that touched on aging, decision making and the impact of these on family and friends.
Too, I would have to make a big leap of faith and take on myself the role of Lear. I had acted and directed my whole career, but had never done any role that even approached him. There isn’t any. It took my colleague in this project, Maurice O’Sullivan, to convince me to try. And, of course, as with all under funded arts projects by my doing this, assuming I could do so successfully, we would save the salary we’d budgeted for the role and use the funds for something else. And we would have to raise more funding.
It was a huge gamble. But at 67 when would I ever have an opportunity like this again?
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