The plot of “King Lear” sprints out of the gate on a cataclysmic decision. Its title character announces he’s dividing his kingdom among his three daughters, provided that they can speechify well enough about how much they love him.

Oh, and by the way, even though they’re in charge now, he’s still going to “retain the name and all the additions to a king,” so good luck figuring out what that means.

Delivering these lines forSanta Cruz Shakespeare,Paul Whitworth’s Lear knows he’s being an old coot. When he says he’s about to “crawl toward death,” he’s a classic geezer getting in front of his age by making a joke about it. Sizing up his daughters’ reactions to his abrupt command that they perform like trained monkeys, this Lear expects only jolly fun. He looks ready to sit back and wolf down a bucket of popcorn.

相反,他被羞辱,Whitworth’s rendering could rip open flesh. Attacking the perceived betrayal of his youngest, Cordelia (Yael Jeshion-Nelson), Whitworth gives line readings that have serrated blades.

Paul Mullins’ production, which I saw Friday, Aug. 18, works not by flashy gimmick. It trusts the sturdy bones of the text and the way that first-rate actors can build palaces from them.

There’s a breed of dread that kindles a state of childlike awe, that makes you ponder your small place amid powerful and mysterious forces of the universe. In meting out suffering, it punishes our hubris; in giving expression to our suffering, it enlarges us. This production knows how to plant that seed of dread and make it grow, flower and fruit inside you.

If there’s any high concept here, it’s that Lear, as elder daughters Goneril (Paige Lindsey White) and Regan (Kelly Rogers) reveal their true colors, doesn’t go mad in the oogie-boogie sense. Cast out of his daughters’ castles, making himself one with a raging storm, he strips his robes of fur and dons a wreath of flowers, but there’s no grand metamorphosis from how he behaves in the first scene. If you lean in, every supposed raving makes perfect sense. Madness here is socially constructed; you call someone mad when it serves you to do so.

Whitworth’s Lear is backed up by an agile cast of supporters.

As Goneril, bidden to extemporize her daughterly love, White makes her first word, “Sir,” both an interjection of incredulity about how weird this whole thing is and a panicked search for more words.

As the Earl of Gloucester, falling for a stratagem to make him believe his good son is in fact the evil one, Derrick Lee Weeden reads aloud a letter in a way that shows how the brain registers discoveries and blows in real time; he finds the exact right emphases to make convoluted verse roll out as bright and clear as the Yellow Brick Road.

As Edmund, Gloucester’s evil, bastard son, M.L. Roberts is like that loudmouth at a bar who charms everyone to his side with a fusillade of verbiage. When he blames a wound he gave himself on his brother and mewls to Gloucester, “I bleed,” you see his whole psychology all at once: He’s still that overgrown little boy who never got a pat on the head from Daddy.

The only functional intergenerational relationship in the play is between Lear and his Fool (Sofia Metcalf). They sit side by side, ribbing each other. Each can tell the other when they go too far; each can take a scolding in stride, course-correct and move on. There’s a tenderness here, born of lots tied together, not conditioned on a public demonstration of love. But then, famously, the Fool disappears without explanation in Act III, never to be seen for the rest of the play. In Mullins’ bold staging, the Fool makes that choice deliberately, entombing themself under a thick, eerily lit door — one more nail in Lear’s own coffin.

Reach Lily Janiak:ljaniak@sfchronicle.com