"Macbeth at the Wilma (2nd review)

Of Shakespeare's four greatest tragedies, two resist easy categorization or summary. Can we say that Hamlet is about filial responsibility, or King Lear about daughterly ingratitude? So complex are these plays that they defy any description short of the human condition itself.

It's fair, however, to describe Othello as a play about jealousy, and Macbeth as one about ambition. These labels get us no further into the plays than labels generally do, but they are salient.

Othello is complicated by the "motiveless malignity" of Iago, Shakespeare's most troubling character, and by the foil of Desdemona's innocence. Jealousy, though, is clearly its motor force.

Macbeth offers no such contrasts to its master passion. Both Macbeth and his lady are consumed by it, although at least initially in different measure. The play offers no significant countervalue to it, or any character who strongly represents an oppositional force. Macduff is a bluffly loyal soldier who becomes a suitable avenger when his family is slaughtered, but he is hardly a tragic figure.

Nor is Macbeth himself, who is not an essentially different sort until ambition twists his simple soul. When Macbeth reflects that he is so steeped in blood that the way either forward or back is a Hobson's choice— almost his only act of introspection— he's not a tragic protagonist confronting a critical decision, but an automaton at a standstill.

If there is a tragic figure in this play, it is the commonwealth itself, numbly suffering, as so often in Shakespeare, the transgressions of the elite.

Wilma's evolution

Blanka Zizka has given Macbeth a broadly ambitious production in her first outing as sole proprietor of the Wilma Theater. The Wilma has evolved from its origins as an avant-garde troupe on Sansom Street to a producer of mainstream modern theater— Stoppard et al.— and is now, in its latest phase, beginning to dip into the classics. This is perhaps a natural evolution, although I, at least, have missed the cutting-edge force that the Wilma once brought to Philadelphia's theater scene.

The new production offers much to admire. Utilizing Mimi Lien's single, split-level set, which is basically an El construction— a platform raised above "steel" girders, with the platform used to depict exterior scenes and the stage itself, for the most part, interior ones— Zizka moves her characters and lighting around with split-second timing and almost cinematic sweep; each scene seems to have been not only blocked but story-boarded.

At the same time, she has done what only the stage can do well, in suggesting action and atmosphere with a radical economy of means.

Welles caught the atmosphere

In one sense, Macbeth lends itself to this kind of staging. It's the only one of Shakespeare's Big Four tragedies that features— indeed climaxes in— a battle scene, and no one who has seen Kurosawa's film adaptation, Throne of Blood, can forget the power and sweep the screen can bring to it.

At the same time, however, Macbeth is more of a chamber play than any of the other tragedies: It's the shortest in length, the simplest in plot and character development, and the darkest in atmosphere.

Orson Welles caught this atmosphere memorably in his own film version of the play. I mention Welles because he began his career on the stage with a modern-dress version of Julius Caesar that caused a great stir in its time.

Zizka also uses an eclectic mix of costuming— modern fatigues for the soldiery, vaguely Napoleonic dress for the noble officers— but Welles, in his film Macbeth, was deliberately archaic in his costumes, draping himself in shaggy fur robes. This was truer to the play's atmosphere, where the three witches, despite their clear evocations of the classical Fates as well as the witchcraft craze of Shakespeare's own day, have an eerily atavistic feel, not only pre-civilized but also pre-mythic.

Challenge of the witches

In a way, you have to get the witches right in Macbeth before you can get down to anything else. They open the play, and if they seem silly (as they easily can), you've lost the game already. Zizka's witches aren't bad, but neither are they arresting, and when they return, sliding down on ropes from the flies, they seem rather the apes of Fate than its grim embodiment.

This point is crucially important, for the twist the witches lend to Macbeth's half-hidden ambition depends on his own credulity— that is, his willingness to credit them as true (albeit riddling) emissaries of his destiny. This is a challenge to present to a modern theater audience, but it was one in Shakespeare's day as well, for we would greatly err to impute naÓ¯ve superstition to the Globe's patrons. It only makes the job more difficult to encase the staging in a constructivist set, and the characters in outfits that range from Graustarkian to guerrilla.

Small scenes and touches highlighted the problem. In the scene of Lady Macduff's murder, a maid is seen hanging out the wash. The intent, one supposes, was to emphasize innocent domesticity, but the effect is jarring— this isn't medieval Scotland, but Currier and Ives America.

Irrelevant cyclist

Similarly, the scene between the exiled Malcolm and Macduff is staged on what is apparently supposed to represent a London park bench. Lovers stroll, and a bicyclist in a red jersey and punk hairdo circles the stage. You can hardly focus on Malcolm's bizarre confession of his own tyrannical leanings, which is meant of course to test Macduff's loyalty. What remains in one's head is the irrelevant cyclist, which stayed for me (unfortunately) as the master image of the production, perhaps because Zizka has used similar devices before.

I'm all for aggressive staging of Shakespeare— if his words can't stimulate a designer's imagination, whose will?— and certainly Zizka's has its virtues. But staging should serve rather than distract from the text, which in Macbeth particularly is crucial to establishing atmosphere.

To put it another way, modern theater as framed by Meyerhold and Brecht was about breaking down the cozy bourgeois relation to the stage, and exposing the theatergoer to threat and dread. But Macbeth does this textually; it is as weird a world as Shakespeare ever conjured up, in which the witches break down for us the barrier of repressed agency and desire that stands between consciousness and perdition.

Macbeth doesn't need less staging on this account, but more, since what it presents is so spookily strange that it needs a visual correlative to frame it. Instead, the spare struts and walkway of Lien's set rarely lets us focus on the protagonists, but all too often force attention on the set itself as we watch the cast weave in and out among the girders, or strain to follow the action on the upper level.

As I say, this requires considerable ingenuity in blocking. But technical admiration shouldn't interfere with our dramatic immersion.

Emotional limitations

The capable cast is headed by CJ Wilson and Jacqueline Antaramian. Wilson's Macbeth displays energy and directness but limited emotional range. His character cannot win our admiration as Hamlet partly does, or our pity as does Othello, but there can be a kind of unwitting majesty even in the fall of a bad man.

There is a dimension in Macbeth that warrants our attention; he is a villain, to be sure, but not without rude courage and a stature that cows his peers. He is partly the dupe of his passions, too, and the root of his evil, we feel, isn't wholly within him. As Lear comes to understand, at some level the gods toy with us for their sport, and turn our weaknesses against us.

There is a depth in Macbeth, in short, at which we can recognize ourselves; but this depth is not in Wilson's compass. Antaramian's Lady Macbeth fares better, although her mad scene, while suitably pathetic, lacks urgency.

Among the supporting players, Luigi Sottile's Malcolm has a truly sinister moment in his speech of feigned tyranny, even though the stage busywork largely throws it away. Malcolm is Scotland's savior at the end, but Sottile suggests— as I think Shakespeare means him to— that a flip of the coin could make him a worse monster than the man he replaces. In this darkest of all Shakespeare's reflections on the nature of power, this is perhaps the most unsettling moment of all.♦

To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.
To read another review by Jonathan M. Stein, click here.