When first reading Young Jean Lee’s Lear, I honestly didn’t know what to think. I stared at my computer screen, slightly amused but deeply torn and increasingly confused. The play had brought up many emotions, none of which I was sure what to do with. This conflicted and untethered response is the same that is evoked by the play’s central themes: death and its aftermath. 

As Lear’s plot unfolds, audiences are bombarded with troubling and perplexing confessions, suggested incest and bestiality, messy interpersonal dynamics, and the multidimensional transformation of character. The world of Goneril, Regan, Edgar, Edmund, and Cordelia becomes increasingly convoluted and chaotic as they reconcile with increased metaphysical distance from the departed King. Thus, Lee demonstrates a skewed and unbalanced reality juxtaposed with concrete loss. Life after death, as portrayed in Lear, is absurd and meaningless. Through the rejection of Western spectatorial convention, Lear employs a multidimensional approach to asking audiences to confront the murky terrain of mourning. From once sophisticated and traditionally elitist personas emerge traits of anarchy and a return to innocence, underscored with themes of legacy and connection.

Spanning across media and beyond the fourth wall, Lee’s work explores the paradoxically contradictory and connected relationship of sense and lunacy. Here, impermanence is shown as rendering the strange familiar and the familiar strange in heartening and heart-wrenching harmony. As such, the themes of Lear resonate as representative of a weirdly pure, individual, and innately shared experience.

Said experience is more relevant than ever in today’s world. From institutionalized violence manifesting in police brutality, a rise in mass shootings, and obstruction of abortion rights to a still prevalent pandemic, the destruction of life is increasingly prominent. Lear takes this increasingly desensitized subject and offers audiences a venue for reflection – whether they’re watching in a theater or staring at the scripts pdf from behind a computer screen.

– Mattea Pappa