Live From The Festival Of Arts And Ideas: Emily Bazelon, King Lear And Noori

Each year WNPR picks one day in the run on the International Festival of Arts and Ideas in New Haven and moves both Where We Live and The Colin McEnroe Show to the lobby of The Study, a downtown hotel.

We go to this trouble because we believe the festival really is something remarkable -- a kind of critical mass of artists, performers and thinkers from all over the world.

Today, one of the festival events we'll focus on is a much-discussed King Lear performed as a one-man show by the Taiwanese actor Wu Hsing-Kuo using elements of martial arts, traditional live music and fabulous costumes. It's kind of a Crouching Goneril, Hidden Cordelia. If I could get a little pedantic for a second, the 19th century essayist Charles Lamb might have really liked this Lear. He said the play was almost too painful to watch. The only way to deal with was to read it and inhabit Lear. I'm not sure he could have anticipated this.