‘It’s not Queen Lear.’ How one woman approaches Shakespeare’s iconic role.
When young Ellen McLaughlin was growing up in 1960s Washington, D.C., her parents would get dressed up – and get her dressed up, too – and take her to the iconic Arena Stage, which she calls “one of the first great regional theaters in America.” She saw masterpieces past and present: “Macbeth,” “Death of a Salesman,” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” – and “King Lear.”
Though she now insists a 10-year-old has no business seeing a play with the madness and brutality of “King Lear,” she came out of that theater dreaming of someday playing Lear’s daughter Cordelia.
“And I did,” she says. But that was much later, after she’d become a professional actor. After she’d soared high over Broadway portraying the original Angel in Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Angels in America.”
Despite her accomplished career onstage and as
