‘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 a playwright – much of her extensive oeuvre has been produced around the world – she was not prepared for the phone call from Tim Orr, artistic director of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival in Boulder, asking her to take on the title role in “King Lear.”

“Tim offered me the part, and he said to me afterwards, ‘Did you realize that you took a full minute to respond?’” Ms. McLaughlin says in a Zoom interview. She’d had no memory of that. Nor had she any inkling, as Mr. Orr told her later, that he was “sweating like a pig” waiting, hoping she would agree to play Shakespeare’s most larger-than-life male character.

Still, she hesitated. “Before I can say anything, I need to talk to the director,” she told him. “I don’t want to be in a production where we’re not in sync on how to do this thing.” 

In sync, for Ms. McLaughlin, entailed multiple requirements: “We’re not changing the pronouns. I’m not gonna do it in a dress. It’s not Queen Lear. It’s not about the terrible things that happen when women get power,” she says. “If we do it right, there will come a point at which the audience will stop thinking about the fact that I’m not a man, and they’ll just watch an actor interpret a part.” 

Fortunately, director Carolyn Howarth had the same vision. She recalls brainstorming with Mr. Orr two years ago: “It’s a hard role to cast,” she says via phone. “So we talked about a bunch of people: male, female, actors of different ages. When we started, I didn’t start out saying, ‘I want to cast a woman.’ But boy, did I hit the jackpot with Ellen.”

“McLaughlin as King Lear fully embodies the character both vocally and physically, giving a fierce performance with non-stop conviction,” writes OnStage Colorado reviewer Eric Fitzgerald, calling her performance “a magnificent interpretation of the ultimate Shakespearean tragic figure.”

Ms. McLaughlin hopes casting a woman to play a male character won’t overshadow what she insists is Shakespeare’s “biggest” play. “Nothing else comes close. And that’s odd to say when you think about big plays like ‘The Tempest,’” she says. “Even ‘Pericles.’ But I don’t think he takes on these huge metaphysical questions in any other play.”

Lear is a “feeling, feeling” character, Ms. McLaughlin says, “much more so than many of Shakespeare’s female characters, and certainly more so than a character like Hamlet, who’s such an intellect.”

Ms. McLaughlin’s Lear is preyed upon by his emotions, “and he’s a character that desperately wants to be loved and yet doesn’t understand love at the beginning of the play.”

Shakespeare, she believes, is looking at “what is man when you strip the human of all attachments, all possessions, all identity. He loses his kingdom. He destroys his family. He loses his identity and he loses his mind.

“And there’s this truth that he finds out,” Ms. McLaughlin continues, “once he has lost everything – which is: What are we at essence? And what do we really want? What do we really need? What is it that he has been seeking and never understood – and that of course is love.

“And he’s redeemed by love.”

Yet, Ms. McLaughlin says, the character understood none of this until “Lear walks out into the storm and into homelessness and into countrylessness and into a lack of power and into annihilation. It’s the harsh education of a king. And learns too late what he could have done with the power that he had.” 

The woman bringing Colorado’s Lear to life “absolutely” believes this play sizzles with contemporary relevance. “People in Shakespeare’s time knew something about the misery of the human condition and what it’s like at the bottom,” she says. 

“We see it all around us,” she continues, referring to modern issues such as homelessness. “We don’t like to see it. So we don’t see it. But if we choose to actually pay attention to our fellow creatures and do something about it, a play like this – which is exquisite – opens the heart to that level of compassion, which is necessary to do something effective to address the suffering of the world.”

Lear’s life is pure tragedy, yet the play concludes with a sliver of hope, “because Edgar, who becomes king at the end of the play, learns in time the lesson that Lear learns too late – which is to pay attention to the people who are your responsibility,” Ms. McLaughlin says. “If you’re the king, these are the people whose lives are in your hands.” 

Despite the age-old themes of this play, the novelty of casting Ms. McLaughlin as a brute of a man arrives at a time of increased legislation banning drag performances and of parents challenging libraries over books discussing gender identity or sexual orientation.

In Houston, in April, a school district canceled an elementary school’s field trip to see a stage version of Roald Dahl’s “James and the Giant Peach” after some parents complained that male and female actors would perform roles of different genders. Those parents insisted this made the production a drag show.

“As a nation, we’re experiencing extreme polarity around gender fluidity, and casting a woman in a male role gets lumped in with that,” says Heidi Schmidt, who is on the faculty at the University of Colorado Boulder and is the dramaturge for the festival’s “King Lear” production.

Pointing out that it was illegal in Shakespeare’s England for women to act in the theater, she says, “The original Juliet was male. The original Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia were all males. Peter Pan was played by a woman for generations, and nobody was bothered by that.”

Ms. McLaughlin adds that it was “very cutting edge” in the 1960s to cast African Americans in traditionally Caucasian roles. “There was no Black King Lear. And now it’s just commonplace to have Black people playing those parts, and I think the same thing is gonna be happening with gender.” (Indeed, British actor Glenda Jackson played the tempestuous monarch at London’s Old Vic in 2016 and reprised the role on Broadway in 2019.) 

Ms. McLaughlin thinks of the play as being about power rather than about masculinity. “The play’s about patriarchy. The play’s about fathers and daughters, and his fundamental dilemmas and his fundamental revelations and joys have to do with the human tragedy and the human experience – and I feel I’m perfectly capable of doing that,” she says. 

Dr. Schmidt put it this way: “We’re not saying anything about Ellen’s identity. We’re not saying anything about Lear’s identity. We’re just casting a great actor in a great role.” 

Ms. McLaughlin says she’ll never have a part this marvelous again. “There just isn’t a part this good, and I don’t want to stop playing him,” she says. “I would do this for the rest of my life. It’s a part that you’ll never get right. It’s like trying to throw a no-hitter, you know? You’re never gonna do it. But the effort to do it is worthwhile, and you learn something from that effort.”

What she learns anew each evening she plays Lear “is that you never know anyone’s story until you try to deeply understand. There’s no dismissing any human being because we’re all carrying these sorrows that are ineffable, and that rule us to some extent,” she says. “So I feel like it expands me as a human being to attempt to understand such a great and complicated character.”

“King Lear” runs through August 12 at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s Mary Rippon Outdoor Theatre in Boulder.