Michael Pennington, two-time Olivier Award Nominee, an artist of international stature
and one of England’s greatest classic actors, will play the title role in William
Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear directed by Arin Arbus. For the second production
in Theatre for a New Audience’s inaugural season at its first permanent home, the
new Polonsky Shakespeare Center, 262 Ashland Place in Brooklyn, Mr. Pennington leads
a company of 22 actors. King Lear previews March 14 for an opening March 27 and a
run through May 4.
Theatre for a New Audience’s production is the sixth major King Lear in London, Stratford,
Canada and New York this season.
Jeffrey Horowitz, founding artistic director, asks, “What does it say about us culturally
that there are these many productions? This is a play about a;written for a King
that investigates what is a King. King Lear is most often directed by men. Of the
current sic productions, Ann Arbus is the only female director and it is the first
time she will direct the play.
“Michael has never played Lear. I introduced Michael to Arin in 2010 when he appeared
with Natasha Parry in our Love Is My Sin, adapted and directed by Peter Brook from
the sonnets of Shakespeare. Over four years, they’ve investigated the play. Michael
and Arin, the veteran British actor and the young American director, are a good mix.
They are ready to do the play and I’m very excited that they now have the chance
to explore why it speaks so powerfully to us today.”
With King Lear, Theatre for a New Audience has produced 32 of Shakespeare’s 37 plays.
Audiences will get to experience Lear in the Scripps main-stage, which has extraordinary
acoustics and an intimate 265 seats. The Scripps’s thrust configuration “brings the
performer and audience into an unfiltered, direct and honest relationship that serves
Shakespeare’s work well. It’s like the relationship in Shakespeare’s original theatres,
the Globe, Curtain, Rose and Blackfriars” observes Michael Boyd, former artistic
director of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Michael Pennington, Honorary Associate of the Royal Shakespeare Company, has been
in the front ranks of English actors for forty years. Michael Billington, theatre
critic for London’s Guardian, and Benedict Nightingale, theatre critic of The Times,
voted Mr Pennington’s 1980 portrayal of Hamlet at the RSC one of the ten best in
fifty years of theatergoing.
In a remarkable career, Mr Pennington has been twice nominated for the Olivier Award,
was Co-Founder of the English Shakespeare Company with Michael Bogdanov from 1986
to 1992. He created and performed solo shows Sweet William, about William Shakespeare,
and Anton Chekhov. He is the author of eight books including Are You There Crocodile?
Inventing Anton Chekhov (2003, Oberon Books) and Sweet William, Twenty Thousand Hours
with Shakespeare (2012, Nick Hern Books). Mr Pennington collaborated with Peter Stein
and Russia’s Yuri Lyubimov. He has also directed and taught in Romania, the U.S.
and Japan.
In addition to Hamlet, his Shakespearean portrayals include Berowne, Coriolanus,
Macbeth, Henry V and Richard II. For the BBC, he played Posthumus in Cymbeline opposite
Helen Mirren. At Chichester Festival Theatre, he played Antony in Antony and Cleopatra
with Kim Cattrall.
Apart from Shakespeare, Mr Pennington’s appearances in classics, modern classics
and contemporary plays have ranged from Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment to Oscar
Wilde in Moises Kaufman’s Gross Indecency. He and Judi Dench have portrayed Mirabell
and Millamant in Congreve’s The Way of the World and played together in Filumena
by De Filippo. He has also performed leading roles in plays by Chekhov, Euripides,
Mamet, Ibsen, O’Casey, Osborne, Pinter and Stoppard. He was just nominated for the
2013 Off West End Award for Howard Brenton’s adaptation of Strindberg’s Dances of
Death. Mr Pennington’s recent television and film roles include Arthur Harris in
Churchill at War (2009) and Michael Foot in Iron Lady opposite Meryl Streep (2011).
Arin Arbus is Associate Artistic Director of Theatre for a New Audience. King Lear
is the sixth Shakespeare play she has staged for the company. She made her Off-Broadway
debut in 2009 directing Othello, featuring Ned Eisenberg as Iago, Juliet Rylance
as Desdemona and John Douglas Thompson in the title role. Othello was nominated for
Lortel Award for Best Revival, and The New York Times recognized Ms Arbus as “the
most gifted new director to emerge in 2009.” Mr Thompson received the Lortel and
OBIE Awards. Ms Arbus went on to stage at Theatre for a New Audience’s Measure for
Measure, which featured Jefferson Mays as the Duke and again received the Lortel
nomination; Macbeth; The Taming of the Shrew; and Much Ado About Nothing.
A Drama League Directing Fellow and a Princess Grace Awardee, Ms Arbus has worked
on contemporary plays at Soho Rep’s Writer/Director Lab, FringeNYC, HERE Arts Center.
Juilliard and Williamstown. In association with Rehabilitation through the Arts,
Ms Arbus has, for five years led a theatre company for inmates at Woodbourne Correctional
Facility, a medium-security prison in upstate New York. Ms Arbus recently directed
Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia at Houston Grand Opera and La Traviata at the Lyric
Opera of Chicago.
About his collaboration with Arin Arbus and TFANA, Me Pennington says “I’d been asked
to play Lear before in the U.K. If you’ve played Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard II and
others, people expect you’ll be getting ready for Lear. But, you have to be careful
and not do it because it’s there. Only when it sets your blood running. About four
years ago, I realized that I was probably ready for it. Most decisions in the theatre
are based on hunches. I had the strongest intuition that I wanted to work with Arin.
And, I love working with American artists on Shakespeare. For all sorts of reasons,
he gives both sides a great meeting ground.”
Arin Arbus shared, “I have talked with Jeffrey about directing this play for years.
I first saw Michael in Love Is My Sin and was knocked out by his sensitivity with
and command of Shakespeare’s language, and how he created complex and vivid relationships
onstage. Both interested in Lear, our discussions lead to a workshop. Michael explored
a powerful King losing his grip on power, losing his grip on his mind and his sense
of self. Instinctively, I felt he could do the role. And I wanted to do the plunge
with him.”
King Lear was first performed for King James in 1606. In a speech to Parliament,
James said, “Kings were justly called Gods and exercised Divine power on earth.”
At the beginning of the play, King Lear share’s James’s beliefs. However, following
his decision to divide his kingdom between two of his daughters and give his third
daughter nothing, the state and family break apart. The self follows.
Ms Arbus adds, “Shakespeare challenges the foundations of Western civilization: the
absurdity of privilege, entitlement, social and economic hierarchies, and man’s assertion
of his power over nature.”
