I’ve known Alan for a long time. Albeit, our paths don’t cross much since his is through Kansas City and mine through Minneapolis. None-the-less, we spent a summer together doing Merry Wives of Windsor for the Minnesota Shakespeare Company back in the early nineties.
Recently I sat down with my friend over some coffee and we chatted about his exploits and in particular, Poor Lear. Now, I’ve got some intimate familiarity with Shakespeare’s classic tragedy, King Lear and wanted to know how the “Poor” version came about.
Alan had been working in the Kansas City theater scene for quite some time coming to the realization it was not offering him enough opportunity to perform Shakespeare; unless of course he could get cast at Heart of America Shakespeare Festival. For the most part, Kansas City theater only has the one place producing Shakespeare … thee place to produce Shakespeare. Other theaters don’t even allow Shakespeare monologs for audition pieces!
Armed with 50 monologues from Shakespeare’s text, Alan had no place to showcase his arsenal. He started performing what he coined as “Shitty Shakespeare” which took the form of Shakespeare roulette. The first line of each monolog was written on a piece of paper and the audience would draw them from a hat. Randomly, he’d perform the result. As amazing as that was, after the first four or five passages, the audience was over it and ready to move on.
“I needed a story for the audience to engage and stay engaged,” mused Alan. “I had always been disturbed by the recurring theme of misogyny in Lear and that anxiety just gnawed at me begging to be explored. So, I started memorizing King Lear.”
Alan found himself rehearsing Lear by the river front, a quiet, less traveled sanctuary, as he went about learning the story. He struggled to find a context in which to give Shakespeare’s tragedy and admits he hadn’t noticed the homeless whose retreat he found himself invading … “then it struck me like the hot kiss at the end of a wet fist. The Homeless! There’s my context!”
“My goal has always been to strip the pretensions from Shakespeare and make something the audience can relate to. I worked with a director through nine drafts of the text whittling the story and its language down to the bare essentials,” Alan continued.
“I had heard that Alan Cumming was re-staging his one man adaptation of MacBeth. I hightailed it to New York and caught a performance. That answered a lot of questions on the how’s and why’s for Poor Lear.”
Poor Lear is a one-man re-imagining of Shakespeare’s King Lear from a military veteran with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. A prop filled grocery cart holds all the surprises that lead to his homelessness. Producer/actor Alan Tilson, in association with Escape2Create, will present four performances of Poor Lear in the TORCH Courtyard June 5 - 8.
Poor Lear was originally produced in partnership with the Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre as a benefit for the Homeless Services Coalition of Greater Kansas City in association with Kansas City Episcopal Community Services. Tilson and Poor Lear were selected from national application for an Artist-In-Residency with Escape2Create in Seaside, Florida for the month of February, 2014. Internationally acclaimed E2C’s month long residencies have advanced the role of the artist and the experience of art as a valued component of community life for 21 years.
Tilson is a member of the Acting Core Ensemble with Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre, in Kansas City, MO. He has acted in 18 MET productions including Main Stage, the Library Script-In-Hand series, and has toured with MET’s The Hindu & the Cowboy for seven years.
He has performed in the Kansas City area with the Missouri/Kansas City Repertory Theater, Heart of America Shakespeare Festival, Theatre for Young America, in Titus Andronicus, The Accidental Waiter & Accidental Holiday at the Living Room Theater, The Country of the Blind Coterie Theater tour of Kansas, and in the title role of Moliere’s The Miser at Union Station City Stage.
Tilson has worked regionally with the Oregon and Colorado Shakespeare Festivals, four years with the Minnesota Shakespeare Company in Minneapolis, and with the Black Hills Playhouse in Custer, SD.
By the way … did I mention he is also a retired Episcopal priest!?! Just thought I’d let you know.
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