Bruce Cromer is an old hand at “King Lear” – he’s played Edgar in an Alabama Shakespeare Festival production in 1984, then played Albany in 2001 for Playhouse in the Park, but the current Cincinnati Shakespeare production, playing through this weekend, is his first time in the title role.

 

Cromer, who has done wonderful work on all the region’s professional stages over the last several years, first encountered “Lear” in a Shakespeare On Film course in college (at Wright State, where he now teaches.)

His long acquaintance with Shakespeare’s tragedy, says Cromer, “is like viewing a crystal from various sides, the cracks, flaws, and beautiful light rays twist and change with every new turn.  

“I've seen the play from the perspectives of the young (Edgar), the middle-aged (Albany), and now from the elderly (Lear) perspectives...   The play is a tragedy for all, but you bring to it your current dreams and despairs, your new-found and long-lost beliefs.  My greatest fear at the moment centers around losing one of my beloved sons, just as they're beginning to bloom as these inspiring young men; no wonder that the final scene of the play hits me with such devastating waves of emotion.”

Issues of aging and frailty are hitting home with Cromer right now. His 88 year-old, widowed mother “has recently been moved out of her own home to first one son's house and then another.  She is starting to lose her memory, she's frail, she's done so much for her five sons during her life...  Now is when the family either truly proves itself a family --- or turns its back on its own.  "Humanity must prey on itself, like monsters of the deep..."

One of Cromer’s areas of research for the role was how a human being dies: the processes that take place to shut down a mind, a heart, a persona, a soul.  It began as a search to define Lear's fatal "illness", but it has become a sobering glimpse of my own mortality --- and our common humanity.”

It’s all part of what makes “Lear” timeless, Cromer observes. “Families fighting over inheritances, battling over who should care for the elders, erupting into armed camps when love and sanity have been driven away...  “Lear” may be about a country torn asunder, the chaos of mankind, but it all stems from an old man who demands love of those incapable of giving it.  And blindly turning away those who can.”