Denice Hicks, waiting to go on as King Lear
It's your last weekend to catch the Nashville Shakespeare Festival's acclaimed production of King Lear at Belmont's Troutt Theater, and we're starting to see why no other local professional troupe has staged it in the past century. Last week, we spotted director Denice Hicks walking down Belmont and shouted, "Break a leg!" — not realizing the last thing the show needed was an enticement to further calamity.
Turns out Hicks wasn't on her way to directing Lear that morning. She was on her way to playing him.
The show opened Jan. 8 to acclaim, with the Scene's Martin Brady praising the show's brisk pacing, its "professional-level performances and directorial ideas," and its "expectedly excellent" technical contributions. But trouble was in the wings. On Jan. 11, little more than a weekend into the run, lead actor David Landon went into the hospital with a bleeding ulcer — the night before Lear was to play to an audience of 230 students. The troupe had to cancel the Tuesday morning show on just a few hours' notice, but no problem: There was a backup Lear on call.
Except he was eight hours away. And scheduled for knee surgery that weekend.
As you can imagine, it's tough to do Lear without Lear.
"King Lear is arguably the most difficult role Shakespeare wrote," Hicks tells Country Life by email. "Although I’ve cut close to a third of the play, it’s still a little over two hours of raging, ranting and eventually dying." There were other actors who knew the play, she says, but they didn't know her adaptation or the blocking. In the end, facing a show the next morning, the company decided there was one actor they felt comfortable with stepping into the role literally overnight.
Denice Hicks.
"We rustled up some costuming for me, I read through the scenes once and went on at 10 a.m. on Wednesday morning with the scenes printed in 18 font so I could read them without glasses," she says. "I had never said most of the words the King says — I’d not even considered playing it myself. I’ve had to proceed without shame or pride.
"Having a lot of faith in Shakespeare’s poetry is what got me through. I knew if I just read the words, the play would happen. And so it does."
If only that were the end of their troubles. Sadly, David Compton, a favorite in the city's theater community, was forced to bow out of the role of Kent due to health complications. That had two actors on books for that Thursday's show: Hicks and Compton's replacement, the show's voice and text coach, Nat McIntyre. But even that was too easy. McIntyre couldn't do the Saturday show — which meant drafting fight choreographer David Wilkerson to stand in for him.
By the following weekend, the production had yet another unexpected problem to deal with — eight inches of it, blanketing streets and forcing a cancelation. Isn't it "the Scottish play" that's supposed to cause all the trouble?
But the snow melted, and Landon has returned to the role. And those who caught some of the hastily rearranged performances say the troupe rose to the occasion with show-must-go-on spirit, and that Hicks did an unforgettable job of stepping into one of the most challenging roles in all of theater. Ironically, once word spread what was happening, savvy theatergoers snagged tickets for the shows she was subbing. That was not her intention.
"The sole purpose of my playing the role was to let Nashville see this play," Hicks says. "It’s a lovely production with Nashville’s best actors doing some wonderful work. Rollie Mains' live score and compositions are truly amazing."
The final shows run tonight and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m.; a 2:30 p.m. matinee has been added Saturday to make up for the snow cancellation. We wish them ... on second thought, just go.
