King Lear, by William Shakespeare
directed by Elizabeth Carlin-Metz, Vitalist Theatre

The Axis of Arrogance: A Lear for Our Time
Vitalist Theatre's production of King Lear has been developed in reference to the works of Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Anselm Kiefer, William Blake, Francis Bacon, Frank Kermode, Harley Granville Barker, G. Wilson Knight, Patsy Rodenburg, Robert Heilman, Caroline Spurgeon, Arvo Part, Philip Glass, John Tavener, J. S. Bach, The Kronos Quartet, Martin Buber, and most significantly, Carl S. Jung.

In Act I of King Lear, Gloucester declares: "Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide; in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked twixt son and father. The King falls from the bias of nature; there's father against child. We have seen the best of our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorder follow us disquietly to our graves."

Gloucester's description of the chaos gripping his time has chilling resonance beyond the boundaries of the Elizabethan world. The catastrophe depicted within the family of Lear and extended to the nation and its subjects reflects the complex repercussions of actions by any leader who has come "to believe the fiction of his own myth." (Jung) The parental and sovereign power that Lear has wielded (and attempts to sustain, despite his pronounced partition) has evolved in Lear a posture of such arrogance that he is deaf to the voices that clamor truth and blind to the effects of his own haughty projections.

Goneril and Regan's determinations with regard to the disposition of the retired power broker are no more willful or peremptory than Lear's own controlling execution of power and demands for declarations of loyalty and love — declarations that, in his own self-absorbed preoccupation, he is incapable of assessing accurately. Inattentive to virtue and heedless to truth, he is cocooned in his mantle of dominance and unable to recognize that any attempt to divest himself of authority will strip away the only identity he has known. For Lear and his kind, power is all. "Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking." (Jung)

To understand Lear is to grapple with the delicate balance between opposites that we as humans must negotiate in a complex world. Faced with the extremes on the continuum between Logos and Eros, we wobble precariously in response to circumstances, potentially tipping too far toward one pole or the other. Governed only by Logos, we become Lear, catastrophically bound by our own conviction that our machinations and manipulations justify our actions and reify our power — prompting us further to banish as traitors all who would disagree. Moreover, without the balance of Eros — which requires informed consideration of the needs of others in order to fulfill our own desires — we can offer no compassion and receive no love; indeed, these very qualities go unrecognized or are perceived as threats. The parallel to the contemporary political scene is striking: pursue self-interest, we are told; denigrate and abandon alliances; never apologize, never explain.

The arrogant manipulation of power by a father or leader thus imbalanced can lead only to destruction. In effect, self-absorption becomes an all-consuming disease, both for the individual and the community at large. "The gigantic catastrophes that threaten us today are not elemental happenings of a physical or biological order, but psychic events. To a quite terrifying degree we are threatened by wars and revolutions which are nothing more than psychic epidemics. Instead of being at the mercy of wild beasts, earthquakes, and inundations, modern man is battered by forces of his own psyche. As with all dangers, we can only guard against the risk of psychic infection when we know what is attacking us, and how, when, and where the attack will come." (Jung)