On stage stands Andrea Jiménez. Her father is Lear, even though he has never set foot inside a theatre. She is Cordelia, but also the director. As in Shakespeare’s play, she will attempt to forgive him. And each evening, without any prior rehearsal, a different actor becomes Lear—her father, or rather, a possible father.

This simulacrum-version of King Lear, slipping autofiction into a canonical text, and vice versa, becomes a meditation on our relationships to fathers, both biological and symbolic, including Shakespeare himself. Structured like an audition or rehearsal, that timeless moment before a work fully comes into being, when everything remains possible, Casting Lear interrogates origins, the ways the past continues to haunt us, and our attempts to invent lives that truly belong to us.