"You'll never be able to get away from Shakespeare," said Visiting Professor of Literary Arts John Cayley during a meeting this past Tuesday where he presented his plan to direct a four-year long production of "King Lear." Cayley admits to "a long-term obsession with 'King Lear.' " He also teaches electronic writing, an emergent form of hypermedia that was invented in part at Brown, according to Cayley. His plan to put this progressive spin on a classical Shakespearean text is both traditional and experimental.
Although it was the evening before Thanksgiving break, about 15 first-years arrived at the meeting, held in McCormack Family Theater, to learn more about the project.
Now in the second year of his five-year contract at Brown, Cayley explained that he has never directed a play but has always wanted to direct a production of "King Lear." The idea for his extended project arose when, realizing that the end of his tenure at Brown will coincide with the graduation of the class of 2012, he saw an opportunity to grow alongside the first-years that he plans to work with.
"We would all live with the play for the duration of our term at Brown," Cayley said.
Cayley plans to cast a company of first-years by the end of spring 2009 who "would agree to enter the world of the play and to live in that world as well as their own during the four years of their university careers," he wrote in an e-mail advertising the meeting.
Cayley arrived at Brown last fall to begin his first full-time job as an academic. He identifies as a poet and worked as a bookseller in London before coming to Providence. He said that his newfound accessibility to the high concentration of people and resources characteristic of a university also contributed to his desire to direct a production of "King Lear" at Brown.
"When you come to a university, you get presented with all these people who have all this potential," he told The Herald. "There are many opportunities to have things happen."
The end goal of this project will be a performance of "King Lear" in 2012. However, Cayley emphasized that the ultimate performance is not his primary concern in putting together this production.
"I'm interested in it as process," he said at the meeting, "what happens, to you, us, as years go by."
Several students who attended the meeting were similarly enthusiastic about the possibility of engaging in such an extensive production.
"Theater is usually kind of an ephemeral thing, it comes and goes," said Ellen Perez '12. "I was attracted to the project because it's spread out over a long period."
Cayley's only restriction - throughout both process and performance - is that there be no modernization of the text. Participants in the production will be able to debate various editions of "King Lear" that exclude or include specific scenes and lines, but the words and identities of the characters must stay true to those presented in Shakespeare's original text.
"We can argue endlessly within Shakespeare's scholarship," Cayley said, "but we are not going to mess with the text."
He said he hopes to implement a rule that any student who is cast, but decides later in his or her college career to abandon the project, will be required to find a replacement, thus best imparting the familiarity with the character that he or she has already cultivated.
Despite these restrictions, however, Cayley's idea leaves plenty of legroom for this process to be experimental.
At the meeting, he presented several options for how he might approach the project. He cited the possibility of assembling two parallel casts, where one would be cross-sexual - in which women play men's roles and vice-versa - and having both casts present separate productions in 2012.
The project also promises to be one that can comfortably accommodate students' varied pursuits. Cayley reassured students that this prolonged production would not prevent those interested in theater from pursuing other theatrical commitments throughout their college careers.
In regards to studying abroad, Cayley was similarly enthusiastic about the effects that this separation from Brown and the rest of the cast would have upon returning to the project itself.
"It's good, going abroad in the junior year," Cayley said. "The whole cast, being in their roles, all over the world. It changes the nature of the whole thing."
The play centers on two men, each disheartened by their children's conniving plans against them. British King Lear is wronged by his daughters - Goneril and Regan - who seek to undermine the waning authority of their aging father. Gloucester, an elderly nobleman, struggles with his illegitimate son Edmund's animosity towards his legitimate son Edgar.
For the purposes of his project, Cayley has categorized the play's characters into two basic role types: "investable" and "peripheral." Of the students cast, 13 will have "investable" roles, those that are more visible within the plot of "Lear". Of those 13, nine will be considered "focal" roles. The other four are also "central" but not deemed "focal" because they exhibit less character development during the course of the play.
Cayley decided to direct Lear across a four-year span in part because of its status as a familiar classic and the magnitude of the themes addressed by the work.
"There are really important classical works you encounter before or during university, so whether or not you live with ("King Lear") for four years, you will live with it anyways," Cayley said. "If you see it done well, you will live with it for the rest of your life. In some ways, I'm not asking them (students) to do anything they wouldn't do anyways."
In addition to a nearly inevitable exposure to the work and its powerful themes, Cayley said he believes that these matters are especially likely to resonate with college students.
"There are themes that are central and pertinent for young adolescents," he told The Herald. "People who are beginning to think about the meaning of life."
The play also grapples with mankind's treatment of the concept of nature. Cayley loosely referred to nature as "shoulds," essential qualities or actions that individuals simply consider to be correct. Characters in the play deal with nature in a variety of ways. One such conception of nature is exemplified by Lear, who wants his children to "accord with nature." To reinforce this point, Cayley cited the King's demand that his daughters verbalize their love for him and treat their father as Lear believes he should be treated.
"There is a lot of puzzling in the play about what nature is and what nature means," Cayley told The Herald.
As a result, readers of the play are compelled to reason about nature but are confronted with differing attitudes toward it.
Cayley cited his favorite quote from the work: "Though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourg'd by the sequent effects." The wisdom of nature, Cayley explained, is identifiable with reason in the play. "You reason about nature in the course of 'Lear,' " Cayley added. "And different characters reason in different ways."
Some of Shakespeare's other works generate an ideal, Cayley said. "King Lear," on the other hand, "is a tearing-up play, not a building up play. It analyzes. It takes things apart," he added.
In living with the play through this four-year-long production, cast members will have the opportunity to engage these sorts of themes in a process of self discovery.
"You can face yourself radically with these problems, which is something students can do while they are here. They can have many philosophical conversations." Cayley said.
"But when college comes to an end, the world is what it is," and such outlets for inquiry might not be as easily accessible.
Though several students at the meeting admitted to never having read the play, after listening to Cayley's explanation of the work, some students noted the relevance of the theatrical world that Cayley hopes to animate.
Others said they were interested in the play because they might be able to identify with some of the characters.
"Last year when reading 'Lear' in English class, I told my teacher that I could empathize, being the eldest of three girls," said Olivia Harding '12. "It would be so interesting to actually live in the mind of Goneril for 4 years."
Cayley added that although there has been a great deal of support towards the project from various campus communities, because the performance is still four years away, Sock and Buskin has not yet guaranteed the project a spot in the 2011-12 theater season.
