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Lewis Reining:

You’re listening to WTJU Charlottesville. For Arts This Week, we chatted with actor and writer, Kate Bennis, about her involvement with the play Queen Lear. Tell us a little bit about your involvement with Queen Lear.

Kate Bennis:

Honestly, it came to me one morning I had written a blog post based on a piece of junk that I found in my mom’s papers after she died, which just said, “announce what you want” in her little scrawl right across the top. And I thought, I should announce what I want. So I had written this blog post about announcing what you wanted. It came out on January 1, and I looked at and I thought, “What do I want to do?” Crazy as it is, can you just announce anything and the world won’t blow up? And I thought, I want to play a wonderful role in Shakespeare. And then I thought, well, I’m kind of too old to play a lot of the female roles, and the male roles tend to be better anyway. So I want to play King Lear, and not necessarily as a man. I thought, what would happen if we read it as a woman? So I sat with my friend Brie Luck one day, and we started reading the play out loud to each other as if this was a woman, and it kind of came alive that way for us. And then I asked a dear friend in town who was a marvelous director, Miller Susen, if she was interested in directing. And she said, “Absolutely.” And then she brought in this really interesting group of people to work with us, which is Katie Rogers, Sian Richards, who had to drop out for a personal reason, but her influence on the end product is immense, and Kara Burke and Claire Chandler, so we kind of came together with a producer, Lisa Bowers and a costume designer Who’s a weaver, Camilyn Leone, and we created this project, honestly together. So many of the conventions that we ended up using surprised even us. So it’s a very lean production. We only have a like, basically a sheet in the back, multiple costumes, five people play all the roles it could be done by people of any age, any gender, sort of doesn’t matter. But it’s five actors running back behind the curtain, coming out a different role. And it’s got a lot of comedy in it, actually, that we found. And I think actually, Shakespeare put some comedy in there. It’s kind of funny and yet very dark.

Lewis Reining:

I’m sure you’ve thought about but I’m a little curious now that you’ve gone through the whole process of creating and performing this adaptation several times. If you’ve had an opportunity to look again at the original and reflect on now that you have your own finished adaptation that feels like it is a complete piece, how does that speak to the original again?

Kate Bennis:

We all as a cast, went to see the production that was done in Staunton at the American Shakespeare Center, which was fantastic and a bit of an adaptation. They cut out some of the characters, the woman who was extraordinary, who played Lear, played Lear as a man. So it was a very interesting production, but it was much more full than ours. You know, it had Gloucester. We’ve cut out a whole subplot with Gloucester and Edmund and Edgar. All of that was in there, and we did that towards the beginning of rehearsal process. And since then, I have not personally wanted to watch anything at this moment, I feel like I want to be in this world that is set in sort of the late 70s, early 80s America with women, and just stay in that world so firmly, because I don’t want to be confused, sort of. And the creative process itself was so interesting. We were lucky enough to have amazing actors and collaborators. So that meant that we were often surprised by the innovations that would come about, and that was really fun. So for instance, when Sian, for personal reasons, dropped out of the play, her presence was really felt always in the fabric of the play that she’d already helped us knit together. And the director, Miller, who was just playing a servant and directing, suddenly jumped into that role, which was very interesting, and it cut us down from six actors to five. And that really worked. And then we had another innovation, which was we had to figure out who now was going to play the fool, because we couldn’t quite and I was the only person playing one character. Everybody else was playing multiple characters. So we thought, what would it be like if I played the fool? And then it took another jump. What would it be like if Lear was the fool? In other words, the fool is a part of Lear. And then we looked back and we realized most of the scenes between Lear and the fool are just the two of them on stage, and it reads perfectly. So there’s no reason that Lear, who is going crazy, can’t have this alter ego that speaks the truth and teases and kind of keeps me company that is part of me. So these innovations were really interesting, and they came about from accidents, from, you know, you need to figure something out. What are we going to do? And these wonderful fixes became so important to us that we think, how could it have been done otherwise?

Lewis Reining:

So one of the things I found curious was that the stage itself it shifts. Can you tell me a little bit about the some of the places you’ve already performed in?

Kate Bennis:

The decision to move around may be a silly one, but I love it. It feels very fresh and new in every new space, and that keeps it really alive. And we have to contend with things like rain and lights and in a new place, you have to keep yourself really on top of things, and it brings this fresh life to every performance. So we have performed at Thistlerock Mead company in two beautiful backyards at sunset, we performed in the little Washington theater. We’re going we had that hammer theater in Crozet. We’ll be at McGuffey, the Fralin in the big, huge marble foyer, Live Arts, of course, and there’s a million different places, and every place demands a new setup and a new way to interact with the audience. And sometimes we’re running downstairs and out onto a field, and sometimes we are coming in close or using an aisle, and it changes our whole performance. And the relationships at this point, because we’ve been rehearsing so long, are pretty solid, so it can really handle that and and still be very constant in some ways

Lewis Reining:

For each of these new venues, how long do you guys have to get used to that new space?

Kate Bennis:

We get there two hours in advance. We set up the stage, we set the lights. In some cases there are no lights, and we talk with whoever is the production manager of that space, and we just do it.

Lewis Reining:

Wow.

Kate Bennis:

Yeah.

Lewis Reining:

For more information about Queen Lear. You can visit Queen lear.org. Arts This Week is supported by the UVA Arts Council and Piedmont Virginia Community College. PVCC Arts presents a rich array of dance, music, theater and visual arts programming. Learn more at pvcc.edu For WTJU, I’m Lewis Reining.