The towering King Lear opens Playhouse in the Park's season, and the approach is exquisitely barbaric.

        How could it be otherwise? From the first scene, when the aging monarch plays a foolish, ego-salving game of inheritance with his three daughters (two of whom are sharper than a serpent's tooth), the action spirals downward into a bloodbath of murder and mutilation.

        The good, the evil and the infirm suffer equally in Shakespeare's tragedy. One of Lear's challenges is surely to grab the audience's group psyche, a psyche accustomed to violence on television and film, and drag them into this realm of roiling primal emotions, chief among them ambition, greed and lust for power.

        One of the production's chief triumphs is director Ed Stern's ability to create stage pictures that surprise and horrify.

        Set in a spellbindingly designed, exotically post-apocalyptic England that appears to be a sort of storm-tossed desert, this is not an altogether successful Lear.

        The problem lies in Joneal Joplin's performance in what is an Everest of a role.

        When we meet Lear, he is a king surrendering his kingdom. There are foreshadowings of the breakdown to come. He rages. He whimsically banishes his beloved daughter Cordelia and most loyal courtier Kent (Christopher McHale) for the sin of honesty.

        When he is brought to his knees by the cruelty of his elder daughters and descends into madness, he begins to understand his failures as a ruler and father.

        It is quite a plateful for an actor. Early on, Mr. Joplin's performance is more broad than deep. He favors a declamatory style of delivery that makes him more hellfire-and-brimstone preacher than king.

        I occasionally found my attention wandering to a close examination of Susan Tsu's stunning costumes and marveling at how the earth floor changed color under Thomas Hase's lighting to suggest changes in locale. But when you find yourself whistling the set and costumes, there's something wrong.

        Mr. Joplin's strongest scenes in the first act (as always in Lear) pair him with Dale Hodges' beautifully modulated wise Fool.

        Mr. Joplin settles into his role in the second act, and he is surrounded by support worthy of a king. The always reliable Philip Pleasants is Gloucester, another foolish noble father whose family strife leads the secondary plot, an echo of Othello.

        Conan McCarty is plotting son Edmund who doesn't intend to let illegitimacy stand in the way of inheriting and plants false evidence against his noble half-brother Edgar (Michael Milligan). Credit fight director Drew Fracher for their down-and-dirty face-off in the finale.

        Bruce Cromer and John Rensenhouse are impressive in supporting roles, as the unfortunate spouses of Lear's elder daughters.

        Like last year's Inherit the Wind, you can see Mr. Stern's careful crafting on an enormous theatrical canvas. Here he's painting a picture of humanity within relentless savagery and for the most part it's a compelling one.
       King Lear, through Oct. 5, Playhouse in the Park Marx Theatre, 241-3888.

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