The Rep’s new production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth opened last night on its main stage in Webster Groves to a spontaneous and sustained standing ovation that went all the way around the crowded house of some 750.
It was directed by Paul Mason Barnes, with scenic design by Michael Ganio that did just the opposite of steal the show: it delivered. The stage was spare, so the actors had the opportunity to just act and to deliver Shakespeare’s language.
From a very effectively simple stage, Ganio came up with an inventive variety of exits that natually accommodated a very wide range of dramatic action, with hot love and violent fight scenes and just about everything in between: a feast, a booze party, a play date, enough palace intrigues to put St. Louis politics to shame, and some acts so shocking it would be a spoiler to tell (or remind) the audience.
It’s a beat-down horror show from a long time ago, probably written in 1605-1606. A peculiar Scottish man named King James ruled the throne of England. Almost everybody knows of King James, whether or not they know it. He commissioned the group translation of the Bible (mostly from Latin) into English known today as the King James version.
People who tend to avoid Shakespeare because his language is old-fashioned and confusing – exactly like the King James version of the Bible can be – should know a few things about this production, which was cast by Rich Cole and (for the child actors) by Carrie Houk.
A lot of work has been put into making the lines conversational. The characters come across as talking to each other, not reciting a bunch of olde English tongue twisters. And more importantly than anything, this is a beat-down horror show where people get voted off the island and into the grave by fistfights and long knives.
It is an ensemble play, and it is played that way, but of course one creepy couple is at the center: Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. The actors who played these juicy and bloody roles, Timothy D. Stickney and Caris Vujcec, were the last to leave the stage during the long standing ovation they had all earned last night.
To give away just one of surprise of this production, Paul Mason Barnes and these two actors really bring out the early lust and love of the Macbeths. In this show, Lady Macbeth pretty much floors her husband and then straddles him as she whispers her sweet dreams of murder into his ear. Stickney and Vujcec acted this complicated love-lust-murder plot scene beautifully.
They go all the way from love throes to two of the greatest psychological melt-downs in theatrical history. The actors playing these roles in 2011 have every kind of challenge, and some really tricky ones. At her most desperate moment, Lady Macbeth says something that today sounds like a stupid soap commercial – “Out, out damned spot!” – yet Vujcec pulls it off without sounding like she is trying to avoid accidental parody.
In the Lady Macbeth meltdown, the lighting almost becomes another character, and Kenton Yeager’s lighting adds the perfect touches of tone throughout the production. It’s a play flooded with torches and candles, lightning and flashing swords, and Yeager makes the most of the many opportunties the playwright gives him to shine.
As for the role of Macbeth, it is saddled with what are now some of the most sacred lines in world literature, spoken when the terrible villain realizes his gig is finally up. Life, he decides, is “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.” Stickney downplays this speech just enough to let the language sink into your soul all over again.
It’s unfair to this ensemble production, in a way, to single out Stickney, but the play is titled after his role and he very quietly accepts responsibility for shouldering the greatest burden on stage. Stickney is a solid, athletic man who gets an incredible workout going through the motions of love, conspiracy, knife fight and jumping up onto the supper table to kick off everybody’s plates and really spoil the dinner party. He does all that while keeping deeply in a character who is speaking complex poetry that is 400 years old and haunted by every ghost that ever ate at the nerves of a dramatic actor.
Stickney also is a black man who played a notorious bad guy on a soap opera, One Life to Live. As written, Macbeth is not a play about race, and this production does not make it a play about race (or about a soap opera doing a star turn in Shakespeare, which is anyway old hat for Stickney). Macbeth is an evil villain who literally ends up with blood on his hands, but there is no “black guy as bad guy” trip going on here, the way there is in Othello, which has a lead villain role written specifically for a black man, a “Moor.” Stickney is a black man playing a part written as a very bad white guy.
And there is more than enough bad guy to go around in Macbeth. Lady Macbeth puts him up to his first murders and remains his co-killer. And it doesn’t get any better from there. The next king after Macbeth is Malcolm, the son of the king Macbeth killed to get ahead in the royal world. That makes Malcolm a prince who suddenly becomes king after the guy who killed his father gets killed. (Contemporary urban retaliatory violence has nothing on the kings and queens of old England.) The director Barnes has Malcolm played (by Ben Nordstrom) as a self-important goofball in boots that are way too big for him. It’s perfect.
It’s especially perfect for when Malcolm busts out his “I’m the bad guy” speech after taking over the throne when Macbeth has been snuffed out. Malcolm is replacing a guy who worked openly with the forces of evil – we are talking about actual witches – to have men, women and children killed in cold blood and in so doing set curses upon the whole country. But Malcolm think’s he’s way badder than that.
“It is myself I mean, in whom I know
All the particulars of vice so grafted
That, when they shall be opened, black Macbeth
Will seem as pure as snow, and the poor state
Esteem him as a lamb, being compared
With my confineless harms.”
Translation: When I start showing how bad my bad self really is, Macbeth will look like Justin Bieber. This, said by a scrawny blonde white boy in boots that are way too big for him.
It was interesting to hear the lines “black Macbeth / Will seem as pure as snow” with a black actor playing Macbeth on a night, when St. Louis was shrouded in ice. It added another layer to the layers of drama and flat-out weirdness in this show, like yet another layer of snow.
