KING LEAR Comes to Compagnia de' Colombari This Month

Throughout 2024, Compagnia de’ Colombari is celebrating 20 years of generating spectacle, disrupting and reconstructing texts and spaces under the direction of Karin Coonrod with a robust Anniversary Season. 

One of the 20th season’s greatest highlights is the world premiere of a raw, primal, and potent “paper crown” KING LEAR that strips the Shakespearian classic to its essence. The play, explored in five “movements,” is adapted and directed by Karin Coonrod with original music by long-time collaborator Frank London, a talented team of designers, and features a diverse cast of ten actors playing King Lear. KING LEAR debuts at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas on June 14-16, 2024, for five performances at the University Theatre (222 York Street, New Haven, CT). Tickets are available online HERE, from $48.31 to $79.18 (premium). Opening Night is Friday, June 14, at 8p.m. followed by performances at 3p.m. & 8p.m. on Saturday, June 15 and 2p.m. & 7p.m. on Sunday, June 16. Following its world premiere in New Haven, Connecticut, a New York City debut for KING LEAR and US and international touring are in the works. 

In Colombari’s fresh, vital and urgent KING LEAR, Coonrod utilizes her signature “multiplicity” (as seen in Colombari’s Merchant of Venice in the historic Jewish Ghetto in Venice, Italy in 2016, which was praised by The New York Times in its stateside tour in 2017 and was presented at Arts & Ideas in 2018) to shift and deepen audiences’ connection with Shakespeare’s most iconic characters. Through a vigorous exploration of the text and the characters’ psyches and motivations, a diverse ensemble of ten actors ranging in age and gender embody King Lear at the beginning. One by one, they strip off their paper crowns, transform into other roles, and conduct a radical take-over of the text and the space. Spreading across the play’s treacherous psychic cartography, the actors dig deep into the internal and external voyage of a fractured soul who loses and finds himself again after arduous challenges. 

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