Queen Lear
Fall, 2012

2012-2013 was a busy year for ImprovEd Shakespeare. We had two different productions in the fall and two different ones in the spring. After toying with the script and adding narration in the spring, I had a group of students who were “serious” about Shakespeare. Plus, they were my returning Shakespeare ‘veterans.’ They preferred straight abridged versions. The Lear script ended up being similar to Tempest, in that I cut the script down to under an hour and did not add narration. However, I had a group of kids that were female majority. It was time to try something new. We began to play with gender and changed the sex of certain characters, depending on the actor playing the role. I let the players choose how they wanted to play the characters. We no longer had a King Lear, we had a Queen Lear.