This 'King Lear' rules with impeccable execution
How mad is reason? How savage is civility? How dark is light?
The great paradoxes that drive ''King Lear" inspire the sinewy production with which the Actors' Shakespeare Project opens its second season. Under Patrick Swanson's authoritative direction, Alvin Epstein and the rest of the strikingly well-tuned ensemble create a ''Lear" that is by turns mordantly witty, brutally polished, and irrationally rational. Their rich realization of all the play's contradictory metaphors is a triumph -- one that would seem impossible for such a young company if its members weren't among Boston's most seasoned players.
Let us start with the most seasoned, Epstein himself, who at 80 has performed in more classic productions than most audience members have seen. It's not surprising that Epstein has a master's kit of tools at his disposal, and he uses nearly every one to create a cunning, quirky, cruelly shrewd but fatally mistaken Lear, whose tongue is every bit as sharp as that serpent's tooth the king invokes.
As it happens, Epstein's performance is at its most beautifully complex in his delivery of that line. Lear is cursing Cordelia, his youngest and most beloved daughter, for refusing to flatter him as her greedy older sisters have done in order to gain their inheritance. But instead of building to a shrieking fury, Epstein creeps into the speech, an old man whose vanity and self-pity are driving him away from the one child who truly loves him. In discovering Lear's grievously misdirected fury afresh, Epstein makes it new for us as well, and the soft sadism of his voice pierces our hearts along with Cordelia's.
In the archetypal storm that breaks over our heads after intermission, shrieking fury does overtake Epstein's Lear. Perhaps because of the clanging metal cans and electronic shrieks that nearly drown out the actors here, he begins at too high a pitch and has nowhere to go. It's a rare misstep in a performance that is otherwise impeccably calibrated, with an almost shocking antic glee in the early scenes of the vengeful king's turning against his children and a wrenching battle between frailty and strength as he begins to collapse under -- and be transformed by -- the burdens his own errors have created. If his final moment of bottomless grief is less unbearably sad than it should be, that's only because this Lear seems so frighteningly intelligent that we imagine his mind has somehow kept his heart from breaking utterly in two.
As remarkable as his performance is the uniformly high standard of the acting that surrounds it. One could quibble that Jennie Israel's Goneril is occasionally too strident, that Doug Lockwood's Edgar descends too far into actual madness in feigning madness, or that Benjamin Evett's Edmund goes an inch too far over the top. But these are tiny flaws in otherwise beautifully conceived and executed work. And the rest -- notably Ken Cheeseman's brilliantly simple Fool, Colin Lane's keen Gloucester, Allyn Burrows's nobly intelligent Kent (who's funny beyond belief in his Clouseau-accented disguise after his banishment), Paula Langton's exuberantly nasty Regan, and Sarah Newhouse's sweet but steely Cordelia -- deserve nothing but praise.
Praise, too, to David R. Gammons's elegantly tarnished gold columns and shifty mulch underfoot. Those columns sometimes obstructed half the audience's view of key scenes, something Swanson could have avoided with more careful blocking. Then again, given that Ben Pilat's lights sometimes appear deliberately to be blinding us, the director may want to make sure no one sees everything. Certainly, in Shakespeare's great tragedy of blindness and clarity, none of the characters sees the light in time.
Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com. 