“Such welcome and unwelcome things at once ‘tis hard to reconcile.” Macduff, ActIVsc.iii
I spent hours trying to find the way I felt about the current Rude Mechanical’s production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth only to have Billy Bard having already wrapped it up for me more than halfway through the show. This particular production is a balancing act of strong performances, questionable conceptualizations, impressive technological inclusions, mismatched aesthetics, and a barrage of death, all of which makes it hard to reconcile in one’s own mind, especially for this one who is deeply familiar with ‘The Scottish Play’ as it is oft referred to by those in the theatre world. Directed by Liana Olear, this flash-rendering of Shakespeare’s bloodiest tragedy will leave you hemming and hawing over what it is you’ve just seen, though not for lack of impressive performances on the actors’ part.
The Rude Mechanicals, who are known for their swift and judicious renderings of Shakespeare’s works, often bringing them in well under two hours and more often than not settling them right in that sweet spot of 90-minutes (and this one even runs a full 90 minutes *including* the ten-minutes intermission…there are no concessions available at Greenbelts Arts Center at this time, so the break is just for audiences and actors alike to visit the facilities.) This is the one rendering of a Shakespearean tragedy that I’ve seen by The Rudes that actually might have benefitted from being a tad longer, having a tad more things included, or at the very least, reconfigured which scenes were included and to what extent. The thing that I found most baffling about this particular cut, made by Director Liana Olear, was her choice to truncate and abbreviate a great many meaty and familiar scenes, while leaving others to run nearly in their written entirety.
The one that comes swiftly to mind is the scene between Macduff and Malcom, where the young should-be-King (played by the spirited and impressively grounded Jaelyn Evans) has a verbally driven conflict with Macduff (played by the equally commanding and intention-focused Stephanie Davis.) I can understand the yen to give these two performers more stage time as they are possessed of keen stagecraft talent, particularly in the delivery of Shakespeare’s dated vernacular. But why draw out this scene, which reads a bit like a whine-fest (Shakespeare’s fault there) and not other, more engaging scenes— like the lead-up to and full siege of MacDuff’s castle? The script’s composition under Olear’s vision just felt a little unbalanced, like the audience was being rushed through the narrative to get to “that one very good part that no one ever really pays attention to” and because of that, losing momentum, darker thematics, and overall intention behind Shakespeare’s work. All of the building moment, the intense brutal tensions that Shakespeare builds into Macbeth is what appears to have been edited out of Olear’s version of the show, which surprisingly does not impact the pacing, but it leaves the show feeling just a little hollow.
But for every curious and questionable decision Olear made for the production, it was balanced with a brilliant one. This was most notably achieved in her use of technology, by way of Technology Director Jeff Poretsky. Following the vein of ‘mystical witches’ not being of the human world, Olear has tasked Poretsky with ‘zooming’ in the three weird sisters from their various locations, which is not only an impressive concept that was well-executed in live-time, but also enables those still unable to perform with The Rudes live in person (be it for health reasons, distance, etc.) to do so. There was even a technical glitch during the opening night performance, wherein one of said Weird Sisters disappeared during their opening scene (it was disclosed later that this was a glitch and not intentional) but it happened in such a way and the other two Weird Sisters rolled on with it in such a fashion that it felt humorously intentional. Giving off the vibe of “Nope— this is too weird, even for me— I’m out.!” Helen Cheng Mao, Linda “Spencer” Dye, and Lisa Watson took up the mantles of these three ethereal-digital witches and really brought that ‘otherworldly’ spookiness with them by just appearing as floating heads on the screen. There was even a very nifty blend of technology-to-reality during their “Bubble, bubble” scene, where you see each of the witches dropping things from their projected hands, and actual colorful silks spill out of the screen and tumble down into their cauldron.
Poretsky sures up the use of the video projections throughout the production for more than just the Weird Sisters too. When Macduff comes a’calling to retrieve Kind Duncan at Macbeth’s, there’s a whole “ring-camera” scene with the Porter, where you can see Macduff and company banging away on the main door (yes, the actual outside entrance to Greenbelt Arts Center) and when the Porter finally gets himself dressed to let them in, they stroll in through the side vom and appear. You also get some gory goodness happening with another scene— the dinner scene, which has been transmuted to be a ‘backyard barbeque firepit event’ but I don’t want to give away too many of the goodies in this review. Suffice it to say that Poretsky plays with the videos and his video play is good.
The backyard barbeque dinner scene, where Macbeth goes off the rails with ‘spooked visions’ is another questionable moment. Not because the performances aren’t there to support it— they more than are— but why a firepit backyard barbeque? It doesn’t feel as if it ties into the rest of the thematic elements and overall aesthetic scenery. Part of the questionability factor with Olear’s production is that it lacks clear vision in the sense that you don’t actually know when this is supposed to take place. And not in the “vague near-distant-future” uncertainty vein of lacking clarity, but more in the “we weren’t sure so we just went with it” vein. The stage itself, (lacking specific credit in the program will herein be credited to Olear, and her dual-team Assistant Directors Wes Dennis and Alan Duda) is clean— doorless and windowless and completely black, save for the red splashes and cross-mark hatches and the big thorny projection screen. With that approach, it lays the groundwork for a minimalist performance. But then the Costumes (designed with gusto by Linda “Spencer” Dye”) don’t seem to follow any one line of style or color thematic. You get Ross (played by Jared Hite with deeply sincere emotions in the moment when he’s delivering terrible news) in blue, but not King Duncan. You get Macbeth and Banquo in varying mismatched shades of war-time cammo, and then Macbeth and Lady M in shimmering silvers, and all sorts of red— styles of era or class structure not selected or focused on. While it doesn’t look displeasing— some of the costumes are particularly impressive (especially the various silver bits that slide into place once Macbeth and Lady Macbeth become what they become) it just doesn’t help tie together whatever setting and overarching concept is running through the director’s mind to bring it fully to the front of the audience’s mind.
Ultimately the show’s aesthetic and overall approach to the setting are too vague to be that ‘near-distant-future-place-you-know’ and not vague enough to be that ‘AnyTime/AnyWhere’ type situation. Trying to leave the visual and aural landscape open for the audience to make their own ideas doesn’t serve the production well here, and if there is a specific time and place, that unfortunately isn’t landing either.
Sound and Lighting and pre-show/intermission screen projections are also somewhat of an imbalanced mish-mosh. While the lighting, also designed by Olear, isn’t chaotic, there are times when it just feels underwhelming. Though the ‘Dagger bogo’ is positioned perfectly (if you’re in the back row of either of the seating banks…as it’s projected down onto a raised surface, the sightlines in the front row of the seating banks are questionable for this impressive effect.) Eric Honour’s sound design was the epitome of subtle, though at times so low in volume it was hard to tell if there actually was sound or just someone who left an app running on their phone drifting up from a purse or pocket. Whether the extreme low volume was a choice or just an unawareness remains to be seen, but in the moments where sound underscored some of the soliloquys and could be heard, it was impressive.
On the whole, the cast is talented. Given the cast set forth on the stage (and screen), after watching the performance, it does call into question the choices of who ended up in which role. Community theatre comes with the old adage of “you take what shows up” and while that may be the case for most companies, this production was gifted one dozen performers who could have been readily shifted around to showcase their talents more fully.
This isn’t to say anything against Olear’s decision to cast against gender or age because that isn’t the issue here. Companies, The Rudes included, often do gender-bending, blind-casting, etc. when it comes to plays and particularly Shakespeare, and that isn’t a mitigating factor for this show. If the casting choices are meant to support Olear’s overall vision, whatever that may be in this case, the vision is not clearly aligned or defined strongly enough to validate this actor-arrangement. It’s not to say the performers don’t do well in their assigned roles; they do. And Olear has a dozen talented individuals at her disposal to really tell this story. But after seeing them in this show, it does give one pause to consider how much stronger and more impactful this production might have been had various and sundry roles been rearranged to the dozen actors who were a part of this performance.
Knock, knock. Who’s there? (Yes…stolen again from The Bard and apparently from Eustis’ bio too!) but it’s Sean Eustis in case that wasn’t clear. He’s there! As the Porter! Being a ridiculous nose-painted drunkard who is stumbling about so much so that he can hardly dress himself in the Porter scene; it makes for good physical comedy during this otherwise tragically bloody text. Eustis also doubles up on the video screen as Lady Macduff, though for the 20 seconds he’s featured one wonders why this scene was included at all as it was cut so swiftly short. And you can catch Eustis as Fleance. If you blink. Ultimately an impressive performer, enjoy Eustis’ shenanigans in the Porter scene early in the production.
Flipping from the noble and regal Lennox to a Murderer, Kate Medwar-Vanderlinden has a fine sense of spatial awareness and stage presence for someone who is given so little to do. The same is true for Bill Bodie, whose bombastic nature is all but wasted in the role of King Duncan. His command of Shakespearean dialect and delivery makes him a true king of the stage. (And not unlike Brian Cox come-to-Greenbelt.) You also get the joys of Bodie, again alongside Medwar-Vanderlinden, as a murderer and very late in the performance as the ‘comic companion’ whose facial expressions are simply to die for when he’s trying to explain to the Doctor (Sarah Pfanz) what exactly is going on with Lady Macbeth.
Before being recycled into the role of the doctor, which is an excellent reusing of actors so as to keep your cast contained to manageable dozen, Pfanz appears as Banquo and gets a very, very brief moment to showcase the camaraderie-come-mistrust between Banquo and Macbeth. Even though their initial interactions are severely truncated, you get this easy sense that B&M are having a bromance (which is ironic as both characters are being played by women.) Pfanz is a firecracker performer, and you really get to see the best of her actions at that dinner-backyard-barbeque, both on screen and live on stage.
The previously mentioned Macduff (Stephanie Davis, who also serves as the show’s Intimacy Choreographer and Fight Captain) and Malcom (Jaelyn Evans) have one of the longer, run-on scenes that just seems so very oddly placed considering it’s somewhat of a nothing scene. Davis’ biggest issue is hir emotional projection impact— meaning: when xie collapses to Ross during that moment of “news” you get this agonizing, on-point-with-a-Greek-tragedy wail that bellows out from the depths of hir wounded soul. But between the way xie’s crouched into Ross’ armpit and the moan of emotion xie spills into the text- you lose the actual words of the text. (This might be corrected by tilting hir head out of Ross’s armpit to open up the space into which the sound goes, and by moan-wailing before and after the line; and it’s a very good line if you know the play; seems a shame to lose it to emotion!) Evans, who takes up the mantle of Malcolm, delivers the moment of darkest humor early on in the play, when roused by Macduff about ‘the incident’ with King Duncan. And the bored/annoyed “oh” that issues from her mouth is priceless.
Taking up the titular character(s) are Aparna Sri and Jaki Demarest, as Lady Macbeth and Macbeth, respectively. While at times the scenes between these two forces of nature feel tragically truncated, both Sri and Demarest do their damnedest to swell their emotions, their stage presence, their sexual tension, their devious thoughts and notions to epic and intense heights, ensuring that the audience is not denied the brutal and grotesque wonders of blackened soul that Shakespeare intended for these two characters to have. Sri, though having several of her monologue’s clipped, still gives you that unmistakable feeling of unease. She perfectly balances the nuance between power-hungry and completely unhinged and you get that switch when Lady Macbeth goes from one to the other in glorious live-time. There’s a contagious ferocity that percolates out of Sri’s Lady Macbeth and burbles over into Demarest’s Macbeth— almost as if there’s one malevolent soul of evil shared between them but it can only wholly be in one of them at a time. This is a pretty wild feat to watch. You can feel the natural chemistry between Sri and Demarest oozing off of the stage as well; both of these individuals do justice to the characters that they’re undertaking, particularly in their moments apart and alone.
As for Demarest, though not quite the 90-minute-bus-tour-of-hell, you definitely get the sense that her Macbeth is a disgruntled demon who is just going to let loose because— why not? Gravelly of throat and voice, a choice that serves the darker moments of the character well, you get the sense that this isn’t a slow decent into power-hungry-driven madness for Demarest’s Macbeth, but rather a rapid skydive off a cliff into chaos. The fight scene, though brief (and lacking what anyone who has seen Macbeth is eagerly awaiting come the conclusion…which, spoiler, you don’t get that particular prop in this production despite all the other really crazy props…like those distorted babies that drop down from The Weird Sisters when they’re prophesizing…courtesy of Wes Dennis) between Demarest’s Macbeth and Davis’ Duncan is fully fueled and really releases all of the pent-up frustrations that have been building (mostly off-stage and in the actual text) up until that point.
Strong performances, impressive technology, and a healthy dose of “Doom Scrolling” (compliments of Olear and Duda for the pre-show intro and the intermission projections), this Macbeth is certainly one for the books. Go for the wild tech, the strong performances, and read the play for the grit, the guts, the gore, and the emotional charge of the overall plot.
Running Time: Approximately 90 minutes including one 10-minute intermission
Macbeth, a Rude Mechanicals production, plays through February 10th 2024 at Greenbelt Arts Center— 123 Centerway in downtown Greenbelt, MD. For tickets call the box office at 301-441-8770 or purchase them online.
