If William Hahn is the face of Colorado’s local theater community, then Philip Pleasants is “the voice” of the Denver Center Theatre Company.
Hahn was so effective at playing an unrepentant child murderer in Curious’ “Frozen” last year, audience members would look away if they thought “that face” might be looking at them.
And anyone one who has heard Pleasants soliloquize as Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol” knows what we mean by “the voice” – that deep, distinctive Southern baritone.
Though separated by decades and circumstance, these two actors will come together on the Stage Theatre for Thursday’s opening of “King Lear” embodying the new look (and sound) of the company under second-year artistic director Kent Thompson.
Hahn recently earned The Denver Post’s 2006 Ovation Award for “best year by an actor,” for his work at Curious, the Aurora Fox and the Mizel Center. He represents, to many, local theater at its best.
When Thompson cast Hahn as both Oswald and a British Army captain, he made good on his promise to give full consideration to a local theater community that for too long seemed akin to villagers outside an impenetrable castle.
“There was a perception in past years that if you had a local ZIP code attached to your name in any way, shape or form anywhere in your life history, you were never going to come here as anything other than a viewer,” Hahn said. “Kent certainly has changed that perception a great deal over the last year. As far as the local theater community, this certainly is the big house, so it’s a nice opportunity to walk out on that stage.”
Pleasants represents a different kind of fresh face. He’s among an array of newcomers Thompson has brought in since 2005. Many, like Pleasants, worked for him at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival.
Pleasants said the infusion of new talent – from home and abroad – is critical to the success of any regional theater company. “Fresh insights from people from another community can only help,” he said. “And it’s essential to include local people.”
This marks Pleasants’ fourth “Lear” production, but he said Hahn’s work as villainous Goneril’s silly steward proves that you just never reach a point where you know it all when it comes to Shakespeare.
“This guy is amazing,” Pleasants said of Hahn. “He comes on as Oswald, which is a small part, but wait till you see what he’s done with it. It’s just come to life in a way that I’ve never seen before. It’s an absolutely miraculous accomplishment.”
Absolute power’s perils
When “the voice” speaks, you can’t help but think you’re in the presence of an American Gielgud, especially when he breaks into Lear’s “strong lance of justice hurtless breaks” speech the way others break into song. But this voice comes to Denver from the mountains of Virginia – “sans the banjo on my knee,” he joked.
“I had the good fortune of having a mother who happened to love Shakespeare,” said Pleasants. “When I was very small, she used to read scenes to me. She would explain them in a way that would make sense to an idiot child like me. She helped me to understand these Elizabethan turns of phrases that are hideously difficult for a modern audience to understand.”
Pleasants’ favorite living-room role was a 13-year-old Julius Caesar. “And as I grew older, and my mother grew older, there was a kind of bond that we shared in an extremely dysfunctional household, and it was of great comfort to us both.”
Issues of family permeate “King Lear” in ways all the principals feel make the story contemporary and timeless.
Lear was a ruler with absolute power but no judgment when it came to judging his three daughters. Preparing for retirement, he splits his kingdom into three, one each for the husbands or suitors of Regan, Goneril and Cordelia.
The two wicked sisters tell poor old daddy what he wants to hear, but when devoted Cordelia refuses to tell him she loves him better than her future husband, it sends Lear into a psychotic wrath.
“Lear deals with aging and legacy and the passing on of money, power and control between generations, and I think that is an enormous issue for our culture,” said Thompson. “As we try to stay younger longer and retire later, or give up control later, I feel like we are setting ourselves up, like Lear, for some very difficult rites of passage.”
The royal restructuring
Those rites are often compounded by degrees of mental illness. Thompson faced that very situation with his parents. “I had a mother with Alzheimer’s and a father who was struggling with an emotional illness, and I faced the issue of having to get in there and get the power of attorney,” he said.
“That was a hugely painful confrontation, but I think that’s why this play has lasted so long – because those are confrontations we all deal with at some time.”
In Lear’s case, he said, the father has nurtured his family in such a way that it had to self-destruct.
“If we have defined our life on our job or our position of power or our wealth, it’s very hard to give that up,” he said. “And it’s very hard to restructure a family or a corporation or a country that’s been run forever on a king-of-the-hill mentality to suddenly go, ‘OK now we are all going to share.”‘
If that sounds like a certain situation in the Middle East, Pleasants said, it should.
“You know, if you look back over the vast mess of history, it seems to be one of the curses of mankind that we are not able to come together and deal with each other in reality, rather than the fables of ancient texts that people wrote out of fear,” he said.
Human beings, Hahn added, are addicted to conflict. Shakespeare wrote “nothing will come of nothing,” and in conflict, everything can come to nothing – from a king’s castle to an American kitchen to an Iraqi market.
“The part that really strikes home for me,” Pleasants said, “is here is this man who is so accustomed to privilege all his life. He delegates it all to his daughters and their husbands and in his madness, he sees the folly of his ways, and the follies of the human condition.”
It’s a thought that prompted “the voice” to launch into the madness speech, when Lear believes he is looking into justice personified and sees corruption and a thief instead.
“Through tattered clothes great vices do appear,” Pleasants recited, briefly interjecting, “This is the part I love:
“Robes and furr’d gowns hide all. Plate sins with gold. And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks: Arm it in rags, a pigmy’s straw does pierce it.
“Isn’t that just great?” he said. “And relevant?”
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
“King Lear”
DRAMA | Denver Center Theatre Company | Directed by Kent Thompson | Starring Philip Pleasants, Sharon Washington, Kathleen McCall and Stephanie Cozart | At the Stage Theatre, Denver Performing Arts Complex | THROUGH FEB. 24 | 6:30 p.m. Mondays-Wednesdays, 8 p.m. Thursdays-Fridays, 1:30 and 8 p.m. Saturdays | $36-$46 | 303-893-4100, 866-464-2626, all King Soopers or denvercenter.org; 800-641-1222 outside Denver
