King Lear – Courtesy of Zach Rosing. Used with permission.
King Lear – Courtesy of Zach Rosing. Used with permission.
With a clear evening sky overhead and cooler air settling in, Indy Shakes, the Indianapolis Shakespeare Company, opened King Lear Friday at the imposing Taggart Memorial Amphitheatre in Riverside Park on Indianapolis’ west side. It was hard to imagine a better backdrop: the stone amphitheater, the open sky and the trees all around gave the night an easy, memorable kind of magic before the play even began.
King Lear is one of Shakespeare’s great tragedies, about an aging king who divides his kingdom among his daughters, mistakes flattery for love and loses nearly everything as family loyalty falls apart. It is often considered one of Shakespeare’s most powerful plays because it works both as an intimate family drama and a vast, stormy look at power, pride, madness and regret.
Zack Neiditch’s direction made Shakespeare’s language feel more accessible, not by dumbing it down but by giving it room to land. Scenes moved at a pace that kept the story clear, and the actors knew where to place the humor, anger, grief and pauses so the meaning came through even when the language was dense.
King Lear – Courtesy of Zach Rosing. Used with permission.
The seasoned cast, many of them Actors’ Equity members, consisted of some of Indianapolis’ most accomplished performers: Ryan Artzberger as King Lear, Anna Takayo as Goneril, Liz Carrier as Regan, Alexandra Miles as Cordelia, Ryan Ruckman as Cornwall, Daniel A. Martin as Albany, Milicent Wright as Kent, Charles Goad as Gloucester, Drew King as Burgundy/Oswald, Kelsey VanVoorst, Jamaal McCray as Edmund and John Reynolds as Edgar.
The standout performances felt fully lived-in: Ryan Artzberger, a Juilliard graduate and Indy Shakes’ artistic director, gave Lear volatility, wounded pride, surprising humor and flashes of color that kept the king from becoming a single-note figure; Alexandra Miles brought clear-eyed tenderness to Cordelia; Milicent Wright gave Kent a grounded, loyal steadiness; Ryan Ruckman made Cornwall cold and dangerous; Charles Goad gave Gloucester a weary, heartbreaking dignity; and Jamaal McCray made Edmund sharply ambitious and convincingly ruthless. Each actor seemed completely at home in the role, making even the play’s biggest emotions feel immediate and believable.
The production team added texture without clutter: Mina Keohane’s score struck the right sinister, foreboding note, keeping a low, uneasy pulse under the action; Zach Rosing’s sound design made the open-air space feel charged; Anthony James Sirk’s costumes showed a creative eye for mixing period shapes with modern references, helping the characters feel rooted in Shakespeare’s world and recognizable in our own; Nolan Brokamp’s minimal set, made up of just a few flexible pieces, trusted the audience’s imagination to fill in palaces, heath and battlefield without weighing the production down; Laura Glover’s lighting sharpened the play’s turns from authority to chaos; and Rachelle Martin’s props gave the world just enough physical weight to feel lived-in. The theater’s technical equipment matched that level of craft, giving the outdoor production the clarity, reach and polish of an indoor stage without losing the atmosphere of the park.
King Lear – Courtesy of Zach Rosing. Used with permission.
I regret that I had not attended an Indy Shakes production in its current space since its debut in 2021, because King Lear was a vivid reminder of what I had been missing. For years, I drove past the Taggart Memorial Amphitheatre when it stood in disrepair and wondered why such a striking place had been allowed to fade. Seeing it restored, alive with actors and audience, made the evening feel larger than a single performance. Indy Shakes is not just using the space; it is helping return it to the city’s imagination while giving Indianapolis’ unusually deep talent pool a worthy showcase. In doing so, it adds real cultural weight to the city’s ambition to be not only a more vibrant arts city but also a cultural attraction in its own right.
King Lear runs through Aug. 1, and tickets are available at indyshakes.com.
