Queen Goneril

“This whole thing. This whole world is against us. Either we tiptoe through it, smiling so as not to disrupt anything, or we push against it, knowing we will be pushed back, or we disguise ourselves within it, trying to convince one another that it also belongs to us. But it doesn’t. This world wasn’t built for us.”

Set seven years before King Lear, Queen Goneril illuminates the struggles of Lear’s three daughters as they try to make space for themselves in a patriarchal system that was not built for them. In Goneril, we find a natural born leader. In Regan, a boundary pusher. And in Cordelia, a reluctant peacekeeper. As the three work to crack open their rigid world, the world pushes back and they themselves in a storm of inner reckoning. Queen Goneril brings the background into focus, and a previously deafening silence to a thunderous crescendo.