directed by Adrianne Krstansky
Presented by the Actor's Shakespeare Project
True, I talk of dreams,
Which are the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,
Which is as thin of substance as the air
And more inconstant than the wind…
If there ever was to be a “dream” production of Macbeth, this is the stuff of it. Full of haunting images that stay with the audience long after the show ends, and plot points that get lost in the fever minutes after they are revealed, it seems as though the Actor’s Shakespeare Company has been so focused on their casting, interpretation, and process that they forgot one thing; the story.
It started off on a promising note, with the three Witches (played with potency and spark by
Denise Cormier, Bobbie Steinbach, and Jessica Kochu) meeting amid the linoleum and lamps of Susan Zeeman’s set. The three Weird Sisters became a highlight of the production; a periodic pulse in an otherwise uncharacteristically weak showing. But as soon as these bubbles of the earth vanished, the audience was left with somewhat of a mess to deal with.
With all the discussion that Ben Everett’s written introduction implies, you’d think the company would have decided if they were going to play the roles as women or as men. Anna-Alisa Belous’s rag-tag parade of skirts, leather corsets, and boots don't indicate either gender too strongly, and the performances rarely add any illumination on the subject. Marya Lowry in the title role is surely scary enough (and man enough, I suppose), with her gaunt expression and wide eyes, but she is stiff, both physically and emotionally throughout the production. Her Thane stalks the strangely oriented playing-space barking h(is/er) lines the entire duration of (what’s left) of the story, with no sense of ark. Here 
both the Macbeths seem loony straight off the bat. And although Lowry’s interpretation was a little too gruff for me, next to the usually consistent Paula Plum’s Gold Dust-worthy Lady, it was a minor inconvenience. I’ve found myself a fair-weather fan of Plum’s, but realize that she is much better suited to the classic comedies (All’s Well That Ends Well) and more brittle, contemporary roles (The Goat and Miss Witherspoon) than high drama and tragedy. Her Lady Macbeth reminded me of my first hesitant experience with her as the odd woman out in the ART’s 2006 No Exit; both roles found her unable to dull her sometimes campy delivery to match her fellow actor’s, making her stick out like a screechy thumb.
And although a handful of the supporting cast turns in some astute performances, it really isn’t their job to redeem a play from its inadequate leads. Steinbach balances her delicious hag of a witch with a bawdy, ball’s out (can I even say that?) Porter, and even gives her strangely New-Age Duncan the sympathetic air he needs. Jacqui Parker brings the heat as a transfixingly butch Banquo, although her way with gender is wasted, and even out of place, in the sea of infertile and impotent performances. The direction gave the audience a few tidbits to chew on; most notably the recurrence of a chalice to commemorate a crowning or deal (dare I suggest a reference to Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code revelations?), and a shadow puppet Birnam Wood, operated ominously by one of the witches. But even if some of the women involved did their lines justice, and some of the directorial touches were interesing, I found myself more often moved by Jeff Adelberg’s lighting scheme and David Wilson’s exemplary sound design than any of the humans onstage.
Adelberg’s sheer variety and inventiveness in catching all of the passageways and corners of Studio 102 was incredibly evocative, and David Wilson’s music and soundscape often made for more compelling listening then the actual text. The deranged lullaby underscoring Lady Macbeth’s infamous “I have given suck…” speech and the persistent thrumming of strings gave this show the suspense that it deserved.
For when the harsh lights settled and the gull cries and echoes died away, there wasn’t much of a plot to pay attention to. With an already truncated text, the company would have needed to squeeze every line for its meaning to be successful, or more importantly, comprehensible, and here they can’t seem to get rid of them fast enough. Even though I had just read the play in a class last spring, I found myself struggling to keep up with who was who and what was going on. In the end, I felt as though I’d sat through “Macbeth lite”; all the images and half the content.
After the success of last year’s all-male Titus Andronicus, I suppose this sort of thing was inevitable, both as a valid artistic response and a way for the Actor’s Shakespeare Project to further cash in, but it seems no one really thought about how they’re really two different ball games. An all-male cast in the context of Titus is really an artistic after-thought, seeing as only two of its characters (three, if you count a doomed bit-part) are female to begin with. John
Kuntz (in one of the best performances I’ve seen him give) gave Tamora a harshness that avoided the kind of evil-queen camp the role can bring out in actresses, and although Paul Melendy was not as successful, his gender gave the rape scene license to be much more brutal than it could have been had Lavinia been portrayed by a woman; distancing enough as to avoid becoming live “torture porn”, but realistic enough to show the true grotesqueness of the action. In an all-female Macbeth, although many digs are thrown around surrounding both genders, and the witches provide an interestingly female center of power, the majority of the characters are male. I can understand casting women in these roles could illuminate some possibly interesting explorations of feminism, and power among women, or of gender roles and the concept of “weakness”, but the ASP Company didn’t seem to put much thought into any kind of interpretation after the cast list was put up, thinking their job done. The ASP is one of my favorite local companies, and it seems they have hit a step that they fell over rather than o’erleap. It certainly was not a completely lost cause, but I hope the rest of their season (especially their “King Lear reunion special” of a Tempest) pans out, rather than dissolve into as insubstantial a pageant as this one.
