New Haven’s International Festival of Arts & Ideas is of course a summertime affair. This year the omnicultural fortnight occurs June 16-30. But for the impatient, the fun begins in late wintertime with a series of A&I announcements and fundraisers.
One big event of the 2012 A&I festival is already known: a two-night stand of Shakespeare’s King Lear as staged by the Contemporary Legend Theater of Taiwan, June 28 & 29 at the Yale University Theatre. This event was leaked early because it also figures in the already-commenced semester-long Shakespeare at Yale celebration.
Contemporary Legend Theater’s Lear is performed in Mandarin with English supertitles. It incorporates Peking Opera staging conventions (that means lively and colorful and acrobatic) and features a live Chinese music ensemble. As for the cast, well, if you’re impressed that the current production of Macbeth 1969 at Long Wharf makes do with just six actors, CLT does Lear with just one guy.
(I know you were thinking “This could be like Kurosawa’s Ran. But Ran’s take on Lear involved like a billion people and zillion zinging arrows. It’s OK. Go watch Ran again anyway.)
The show stars Wu Hsing-kuo, who leans heavily on the roles of the King and the Fool and also apparently interpolates his own comments into the performances. The piece has been around for a few years. It played the Brisbane Festival in Australia in 2008 and wowed the Edinburgh International Festival this past August, where London’s Financial Times critic Martin Hoyle praised it as “partly a class in theatre history, partly a hymn to the universality of dramatic art, entirely a love song to an ancient culture.”
Other highlights of Arts & Ideas 2012 will be announced at a “member preview party” March 27. The festival’s already looking beyond June, hosting a travel package to the Edinburgh Festival Aug. 9-14.