In the 1800s, Texas was a hard place to live.
Not only were the wide-open plains fraught with greedy landowners hell-bent on acquiring land at whatever cost and cowboys and Indians engaging in frequent skirmishes, it was also the bloody battleground between the U.S. and the Mexicans.
If you ask Oscar-winning actress Marcia Gay Harden, though, she’d tell you the prairie was the perfect setting to retell the Shakespearean classic King Lear. In her newest film, the TNT original movie King of Texas, we get to see just that.
The tragedy gets a Western twist as an egomaniacal Texas rancher, played by Emmy-nominated Patrick Stewart, comes home from the war to divvy up his land between his three supposedly devoted daughters: Susannah (Harden), Rebecca (Lauren Holly) and Claudia (Julie Cox). All he wants in return is for them to prove their love to him.
For Susannah and Rebecca the sacrifice is easy, but for Claudia, who truly loves her father, the challenge is too great. He banishes her but soon realizes how venomous his other daughters really are as they force him off his own land and wage war with a rival Mexican rancher (Steven Bauer). Lear’s sudden downfall leaves him emotionally weak and fighting for his life, his honor and the one daughter who loves him.
We talked to Harden about how easily Shakespeare’s work can be translated into any time and how the women in this Lear adaptation get to be a lot more fierce then Shakespeare ever imagined.
I was an English major in college and wrote a paper on King Lear. This was familiar territory for me.
Marcia Gay Harden: Was it disconcerting to you to not have the play done in the iambic pentameter or the language?
Not really. I’m not a Shakespeare purist, as it were.
Harden: Neither am I. I don’t believe in it. The whole point is to make the story accessible. I think in terms of theater, being a complete purist (which is redundant) turns it into a museum piece. By the same token, putting a Greek chorus in go-go boots just to make it accessible, it’s like, “OK, I don’t think we need to see the Oedipus chorus in go-go boots to understand what their function is. Ultimately, as long as it’s illuminating something about the story to make it accessible, why not?
Why do you think Shakespeare translates so well, that his stories resonate as much today as they did hundreds of years ago?
Harden: Well, first of all, he was a genius in his understanding of humanity. It’s a vast universal understanding of the human emotion. Like Mozart, like Beethoven, even like some of the Greeks, the emotions in the stories (and the music) had such universal appeal that is almost doesn’t matter the time. Shakespeare set a lot of his dramas in a historical perspective or war perspective or he would study what was going on at that time. In the case of King of Texas, they take it out of this perspective and set the action during the U.S-Mexican War in the 1800s.
Which completely fits the subject matter, I think.
Harden: I do too! I think the brutality of that particular Texas march toward boundaries and disregard for boundaries, the killing of the Mexicans and Indians and the brutality of the war, as well as the savagery of life on the Texan plains, is a great way to retell the story of King Lear. It is a great way to put it in America, to make it accessible. It is also a reminder that brutality isn’t just limited to the bloody conflicts in England. It is right here at home, on our own borders.
And the women are certainly no shrinking violets.
Harden: They are ranch girls, not Southern belles. They are very tough. And I think some of that comes through from the fact that they work the land, literally slitting the throat of the pig so they can eat. People who work their land have a much less sentimental approach to life. We buy our meat packaged, they kill their own cows. They have a different understanding of pain and the cycle of life–what is cruel and what is not cruel.
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I really enjoyed the scene where Patrick Stewart, as your father, comes into the kitchen and orders your character, Susannah, to make dinner for everyone–and you simply tell him you loathe him. Shakespeare’s women didn’t have to cook dinner.
Harden: And you’ll never see a Shakespearean scene [set] in a kitchen. With the smaller life of what we were doing–making dinner–we were telling the story about the larger life. It’s also the arrogance of the men, coming home and demanding the women to do their roles.
Exactly. Even if Susannah is a true villain, as a woman, that bothered me. I wanted her to rebel, to stand up for herself.
Harden: Susannah is not a villain! Sure, you can cut right to the chase and say, “But she pokes someone’s eyes out!” and when I first got the part, I was like “Oh God, I poke someone’s eye out! How do I approach that?” Well, you can draw upon the time you smashed the roach and sent it to the garbage disposal, grinding it 15 minutes longer than necessary. But the most important aspects of the story to me are the political machinations of the family. Susannah has one telling sentence she says to her father, “You worked our mother to death and you never cared about me.” And that’s what I built a lot of the character on. Imagine a beautiful young mother following her militant, arrogant, land-hungry husband to Texas. And all he wanted was to conquer and get more land. So the mother worked and worked until they got more land and more money and then she died.
Which is what women did back then.
Harden: Exactly. Which is what the women in my family did because I come from a long line of Texans. There is a scattering of unmarked graves all over Texas of the women in my family history. So, here’s Susannah who takes over the family, with two younger sisters and a brother, who gets all the attention. Then the brother dies and the youngest, prettier daughter, who can afford to be pretty because she didn’t have to work like Susannah did, gets the father’s love. You gel it all together and you get her motives. She’s jealous. She’s pissed off. She wants power. And she’s never going to get what she wants from her father.
I always think of Lear as being more of a fragile character, but Patrick plays him much tougher, like a true Texan.
Harden: He doesn’t ask for you to like him. This is the way he is. The need for his daughters to tell him they love him, I understand. But it’s the game that’s unacceptable. Another line I love is when Susannah tells her father that he didn’t give this land to her, he made her earn it. The harsh realization for Susannah is that her father doesn’t love her–and that’s a painful place to be. I like that Patrick doesn’t pander to those emotions. He kept his stern demeanor.
The rest of the cast does an excellent job as well.
Harden: I was thrilled with the whole cast. To get to know these guys as people was great. One night, [executive producer] Robert Halmi took all of us to dinner, and he had hired a really brilliant Mariachi band to play. Not your average, run-of-the-mill band, but extraordinary musicians. At one point, Steven Bauer [who plays the rival Mexican rancher Menchaca] got up and starting singing with the band. It was magical.
OK., one last question: It’s been a year now. How has winning the Oscar [Best Supporting Actress for Pollock] changed you?
Harden: Well, now I don’t have to do it. There was always this sense of chasing the carrot and now I don’t have to anymore. In a personal way, it’s obviously a huge gratifying achievement. In a business way, I think things sort of trickle down. The day after I won, I was a little surprised to find Steven Spielberg wasn’t standing on the front lawn…you know, the fantasy. Instead the postman was there, saying “You did it!” and gave me a hug. That’s reality. The benefits trickle down and are there, but not the ones you live your life for.
