Like many actors of a certain age and stature, John Lithgow decided it was time to do “King Lear.”
And why not? Although many still remember him as the comic patriarch of “3rd Rock From the Sun,” he has bona fide dramatic stage cred — you can picture him as the haunted monarch who divides his family before being shunned by them. (Spoiler alert: Everybody dies.)
And since this marks Annette Bening’s return to New York theater after 26 years — plus this being Shakespeare in the Park’s first “Lear” since 1973 — you can’t blame people for licking their lips.
The letdown matches the anticipation.
His face half-submerged by snowy whiskers, Lithgow seems relatively benevolent at the beginning, like Santa playing favorites with his three daughters. He fares best when Lear falls from grace into madness, adding flashes of light whimsy into the king’s doddering vulnerability. What’s missing is the tragedy — we never really get a sense of Lear’s soul- and mind-crushing pain.
The eldest of his daughters is Bening’s Goneril, who here looks like a matron back from Neiman Marcus, all haughty attitude and zero signs of internal life. Instead, she simply enunciates. Everything. Crisply.
The better performances come from veteran, less starry actors, including Jay O. Sanders, reliably sturdy as Lear’s faithful Kent, and Jessica Collins’ honorable Cordelia, the daughter whose honesty tragically backfires. Best of all is Steven Boyer (“Hand to God”), whose diminutive, tightly wound Fool suggests a roiling anger under his jests and songs. That he seems more miserable by the play’s tragic turns than Lear himself is saying something.
And then there’s Jessica Hecht (“The Assembled Parties”), giving her usual idiosyncratic line readings to Regan, Lear’s middle daughter. Her Regan is a high-strung bundle of neuroses, and her bug-eyed, maniacal delivery of accusations like “O filthy traitor!” enlivens the torture of the elderly Gloucester (Clarke Peters), which is otherwise flat. That director Daniel Sullivan can make eye-gouging dull must count as some kind of an achievement.
Likewise, John Lee Beatty’s slab-gray set is handsome but characterless. It does the job, which is the most you can say of this journeyman production.