Rhoads is tremendous at playing Lear in decline, perhaps because he’s so good at playing Lear at full strength. His big white beard gives him a jolly quality at first; Lear, freed from the constraints of ruling, rollicks with his soldiers, including his disguised courtier Kent (the excellent, searching Zack Fine). Disoriented by his older daughters’ sudden shift to condescension and contempt, Lear laughs louder than his men to cover up his confusion. Did anyone ever respect him? Everyone said they did. You watch him puzzling over the contradiction — and then losing his mind at the answer.
“King Lear” contains plenty of death and betrayal and sorrow, but the most piercing exchange in this production comes quite early, in Act I, when a still-sane Lear is listening with half an ear to his loyal Fool (Nance Williamson). The Fool asks one of his interminable riddles — “Thou canst tell why one’s nose stands i’ th’ middle on’s face?” — and Lear answers him graciously, keeping his assigned place in the joke. Rhoads invests his simple “no” to the Fool with both deep affection and a kindly air of distraction. Lear has just begun to realize the great mistake he’s made in rejecting Cordelia, and his mind is reeling. Still, he plays along rather than ignore an old friend. It’s the only largess he has left to give.
In a mirror plot to Lear’s, the Earl of Gloucester (Howard W. Overshown) trusts wrongly too — he chooses to believe his wicked son, Edmund (Keshav Moodliar), over the good son, Edgar (Eric Berryman). Moodliar and Berryman also play brothers at odds in “As You Like It,” and in both productions Berryman uses his weary gravitas to ground the play. As the moral Edgar in “King Lear,” he’s the philosophical still-point; as the baddish guy Oliver in “As You Like It,” he’s the only adult in a world of emotional teenagers. (His Oliver also gets to fall in love with Safiya Harris’s marvelous Celia, who seems smarter in this version than every other character combined.)
Moodliar is Orlando, an outcast who befriends a young man he meets in the Forest of Arden. This “shepherd” with a cameo profile is, of course, actually his disguised beloved, the noblewoman Rosalind (Helen Cespedes), hiding in sylvan exile. While I did have concerns about “As You Like It” — Laube incorporates new songs by Amanda Dehnert that fit awkwardly — there are pleasures to be found in the way the two shows interact. In “King Lear,” for example, Cespedes also plays one of Lear’s vicious daughters, Regan. That double-casting made me think twice about Rosalind’s mean-girl tendencies. Ugh, she can totally be such a Regan.