Mother Lear at We Players

An irascible scholar with dementia communicates with her caretaker daughter using only the text of Shakespeare's King Lear, as the two struggle with aging, love, and their own balance of power.

First premiered in autumn 2014, this new take on our distilled two-person King Lear features powerful female performers in a fraught mother-daughter relationship. The mother is the monarch of her story and her imagination chooses the most epic death (Lear’s) to emulate in her final hour; her caretaker daughter becomes Cordelia, Fool and a host of other voices, conducting her mother to her last breath. Their story, one of the familiar and familial struggles of age, pride, regret, power, forgiveness and love, is played out through the incomparable text of Shakespeare’s Lear. The piece invites us to explore our own relationship to mortality, death and loss - and how we might move from fear to acceptance.

This two-person, one-hour distillation of King Lear is designed to invite conversations about the meaning and experience of death. After each performance a special guest whose life’s work involves the dying will share thoughts and host a general conversation among those who wish to participate.