GRINNING FROM LEAR TO LEAR
Redux, adjective
From the Latin, returning, from reducere to lead back
To be brought back or returned, especially in a new way.
When it comes to repackaging Shakespeare, nothing’s off-limits. Indian director Vishal Bhardwaj’s noir-flavored trilogy (Maqbool, Omkara, Haidar [or Macbeth, Othello, and Hamlet]) turned the plays into modern crime sagas. for Twelfth Night, Robert Kauzlaric’s Lion in Illyria swapped out human characters for a zoo of speaking animals. James Ijames’ Fat Ham set Hamlet in a backyard barbecue, where a queer Black man is haunted by his father’s ghost between ribs and potato salad. I once saw Macbeth staged in an empty swimming pool, the actors completely nude and smeared in white greasepaint. (They said it was Macbeth. Your guess was as good as mine.)
Jack Stehlin
There’s an anxiety that Shakespeare will calcify into something museum-like—locked behind 400-year-old syntax and the varnish of tradition.
Fair enough. It’s a valid fear.
The only worthwhile test of these reanimations is whether they bring us closer to what Shakespeare was chasing.
Eve Danzeisen, Jack Stehlin, Jade Sealey, Andres Velez, Ahkei Togun, Dennis Gersten
At the Odyssey Theatre, Lear Redux: A Quantum Fantasia, adapted, choreographed and directed by John Farmanesh-Bocca, does just that. It’s smart, strange, full of electricity and eccentricity, with added points for both inventiveness and intelligence.
Jack Stehlin and Ensemble
Farmanesh-Bocca and his Not Man Apart Physical Theatre Ensemble have staged works of staggering theatricality in the past, including Tempest Redux at this same venue in 2016 and Pericles Redux at Kirk Douglas Theatre in 2009, also in association with The New American Theatre. His productions are conceptual kaleidoscopes drawing on different styles and disciplines that he twists and turns to form unexpected patterns, both dynamic and vibrant in nature. This production, too, feels like it’s been wound up and let loose. It mixes forms with no apologies, throwing movement, music, and memory into a blender, with modern dialogue interspersed with that of the Bard.
Emily Yetter and Jack Stehlin
The show opens in a lavish bedroom. Our aged unnamed Actor (Jack Stehlin) lives among mementos of his illustrious stage career: old programs, posters, and—a painful reminder of mortality—enough medication on the night table to stock a clinic. A looming photo of his Hamlet-era self stares down like a ghost with perfect cheekbones, and appears to be taunting the “yellow leaf” he’s become. And there are flowers. Lots of flowers.
The Actor amuses himself, and us, by rehearsing various versions of his death. He fakes poisonings, mimics stabbings, and finally flops onto his bed like a vaudevillian corpse.
Andres Velez, Jack Stehlin, Emily Yetter, Jade Sealey and Ahkei Togun
Subtlety is not on the menu. Across the footboard, painted in bold caps: THE ACTOR WILL DIE TONIGHT.
Following a dance number (yes, a dance number), we segue into a projected video segment plucked from 60 Minutes (expertly constructed by editor Shaun Peterson with Brenda Strong as the off-camera commentator), which firmly establishes that we are in the presence of theatrical royalty and introduces us to his long-suffering family.
Emily Yetter, Eve Danzeisen, Jack Stehlin, Ahkei Togun
For the next 90 minutes, forget a literal retelling of Lear. This is an actor’s fever dream as he nears the end of his life. Being attended to by two male nurses on 12-hour shifts, this famous actor—and his faithful dog, Cordelia—will be visited by his patient brother and two fed-up daughters, all equally unnamed. Later, the Actor will leave his home and wander around west L.A., ending up with three street folk who will mirror roles from Lear (the Fool has been excised altogether).
Jack Stehlin and Ensemble
Farmanesh-Bocca doesn’t just quote Shakespeare. He collides it with the too-familiar story of a brilliant parent slipping into dementia. That slow unraveling becomes the real tragedy here, rendered with care but also with surreal theatrical wit.
Jack Stehlin, Ahkei Togun, Andres Velez
It is difficult, and perhaps inconsequential, to frame the narrative within a precise reality—somewhat akin to trying to pin a very large monarch butterfly to a specimen display. Indeed, when family members agree to play along with the opening scene of Lear with the old Actor on his bed, it seems like a forgotten sense of occasion: are we within the aged actor’s confused reality, flowing in and out of memories of some long-ago performance in the park? The narrative resists logic in favor of texture. Maybe we’re in the Actor’s mind. Maybe we’re jumping between past performances and present delusions. The production doesn’t clarify, and it doesn’t need to.
Eve Danzeisen, Andres Velez, Jade Sealey and Jack Stehlin
The three family members are the Actor’s brother (Dennis Gersten), an actor himself who is painfully aware of having always been in his brother’s shadow, but who is still loyal enough to serve as his Kent when the time comes. Then there are his daughters who act out Goneril (Jade Sealey) and Regan (Eve Danzeisen), both of whom feel the insignificance brought about by a father who cared more for the applause of strangers than the love of his children.
Emily Yetter, Ahkei Togun, Dennis Gersten, Jack Stehlin and Jade Sealey
As in Lear, there is a third sister, who we learn from the 60 Minutes segment died tragically young. The namesake of the youngest sister— Cordelia, the Dog—is played by Emily Yetter with remarkable emotion operating a superbly designed puppet by Eli Presser. Yetter will later also make an appearance as his deceased daughter’s spectral presence.
Ahkei Togun, Jack Stehlin, Jade Sealey
True to the subtitle, this is a fantasia. Scenes loop, restart, glitch. Lear Redux is playful and morbid, loose-limbed and emotionally blunt. It’s the kind of thing that works best if you stop trying to pin it down.
Emily Yetter, Jack Stehlin, Andres Velez
Lear is recognizable here, and certainly not absent from the stage. There are the actor’s two caretakers, his Day Nurse (Ahkei Togun) and Night Nurse (Andres Velez), who bring about a recurrence of the fraternal antagonism of Shakespeare’s two brothers, with Velez mirroring the actions of the devious Edmund the bastard by framing Togun’s unsuspecting Edgar before he proceeds to his seduction of Lear’s two daughters. Later, the howling storm on Lear’s rain-ravaged heath turns into a a 7-Eleven parking lot, where a monologue about consciousness and time is delivered by a blind homeless prophet. It’s more Beckett than Bard, and, given Gersten’s spectacular reading, it lands.
Emily Yetter, Jack Stehlin, Ahkei Togun
As always with productions at the Odyssey, the backstage artists deliver. Mark Guirguis’s malleable and elegant set slides between illusion and decay, while Bosco Flanagan’s lighting cuts cleanly through the visual chaos, guiding us even when the text wanders. Farmanesh-Bocca is responsible for the sound, which includes an amazing set list of songs from standards to rock.
Emily Yetter, Jack Stehlin, Dennis Gersten
But the real strength is in the characters of Shakespeare’s drama because they are invested with a humanity denied in most stagings. Sealey and Danzeisen refuse the easy reading of Goneril and Regan as villains. Instead, they feel like women crushed by the emotional black hole of their father’s decline. The loyalty of Gersten’s Kent, Togun’s Edgar, and Presser’s Cordelia dog-puppet all take on a deeper, more sincere depth: They sought to humor the aged actor by playing along with his delusions, and then evolve into roles they are committed to, thus becoming acts of ministry.
Jack Stehlin
The captivating Stehlin is the North Star here, holding the center. Magnetic, slippery, mercurial, engaging and somehow both grand and intimate, he pulls the audience with him through every turn. It’s a performance that never looks back.
Jack Stehlin
In the final analysis, Lear Redux does serve Shakespeare’s original intent, as he witnesses what must be endured for a bad king to evolve into a man worthy of weeping for.
What’s left by curtain is not a lesson, or even a moral arc. Just the ache of something once massive being slowly carved down to human scale.
photos by John Dlugolecki Photography
Lear Redux: A Quantum Fantasia
New American Theatre and Not Man Apart Physical Theatre Ensemble
Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd
Fri and Sat at 8; Sun at 2; Wed at 8 (June 11 & 25); dark July 4
ends on July 13, 2025
for tickets ($20-$43), call 310.477.2055 ext. 2 or visit Odyssey Theatre
*Wine Night Fridays: Enjoy complimentary wine and snacks
after the show on the third Friday of every month.
