"Macbeth' at the Wilma (3rd review)

Theater today must somehow stand upon a past century of almost unprecedented butchery and mass death. And it cannot ignore the madness of continuing genocides abroad, a heroic presidency reduced to "Obama's wars," and a politics that can bring us a nearby Senatorial candidate who dabbled with witches. What better time, then, to return Macbeth to the stage, and via such an outstanding Wilma Theater production that, through Blanka Zizka's direction, virtually re-invents the play for us?

Don't expect Macbeth to provide answers to the world's legacies of tyranny and killing. The pervading darkness of Macbeth— the Shakespeare play and this Wilma production—provides only enough light to uncover the contradictions and mysteries: "Fair is foul, and foul is fair/Hover through the fog and filthy air," our three witches intone us early in the play. We the audience, plumbing the presence and sources of evil, could well ask Macbeth's own question: "What is the night?"

The remarkable strength of this Wilma production, set in an indeterminate time of the last half of the 20th Century, is its clarity of language and action that releases the power of the play through means that are spare and devoid of the gratuitous heat of actors' or director's histrionics. Here the horror and nihilism are distinctly discerned with no loss of visceral impact.

The ensemble cast seemed to truly grasp the meaning of the complex script's lines. Even if some dialogue seemed slowed down at times, this practice enhanced an audience's listening and comprehension of some extraordinary poetry of the stage.

Indeed, in my reading the text of the First Folio edition used in this production, I was surprised by Shakespeare's repeated mid-sentence and end-of-sentence punctuations, using colons and question marks and line breaks that create two or three words for a line, suggesting that rapid-fire delivery, smothering rhythms and meanings, was not what had been originally intended.

Better than London

The clarity also allows us to revisit and better understand the other characters and settings that co-habit with Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. The production resonated with an ensemble synergy often absent in large-scale productions (this Macbeth fielded 20 actors, a rarity for a Philadelphia stage). And compared to a recent Macbeth I saw at London's Globe Theater last spring, this production sounded truer to the play that Shakespeare wrote.

In a welcome manner, neither CJ Wilson's Macbeth nor Jacqueline Antaramian's Lady Macbeth play to the expected audience stereotypes of their expected roles. Wilson projects a handsome, all-American football star beefiness and Antaramian the refined regalness of a beauty far removed from murderous gore.

But their surface affect diminished little from their characterizations, which to me spoke the truth of the madness and evil that inhabit the seemingly sane among us. (The Nixon who bombed Cambodia and the Bush who invaded Iraq always projected the solemn "presidential" facade to the public.) Macbeth, after all, advises his wife to "make our faces vizards to our hearts,/Disguising what they see."

Animal-like menace

While Wilson more slowly manifests Macbeth's evil along Shakespeare's narrative arc for him (initially, his "function is smother'd in surmise"), Antaramian from the outset coolly yet convincingly conjures the spirits to "unsex me here" and assures Macbeth to "Leave all the rest to me."

Wilson's "Is this a dagger which I see before me?" speech sets his mad fury ablaze, and his animal-like, menacing crouched movements enhance the effect, which is reprised in the Banquo ghost scene, where Wilson tears off his shirt to battle a murdered spirit who refuses to rest. We readily feel the exhaustion and emptiness of Macbeth's later "Tomorrow and tomorrow" speech. Antaramian joins with Wilson in a marital death spiral, she declaring, "'tis safer to be that which we destroy" to his "better be with the dead." Antaramian's "Out, damned spot" sleepwalking scene was disquietingly horrific.

Some scholars have questioned Shakespeare's lack of sufficient grounds to explain Macbeth's personality changes, but I think a super-natural answer is offered by the Wilma production's extraordinary presentation of the three "weird sisters" a/k/a witches, played memorably by Nako Adodoadji, Rachael Joffred and Krista Apple (who also portrayed an abandoned Lady MacDuff with conviction). The witches are splendidly presented, impregnating the minds and bodies of their lead victims, as well as the very space of the theater, with powers that are believably chilling. With an assist from choreographer Brian Sanders, Zizka gives aerial flight to these sisters who walk backwards up walls and, after beginning dialogue offstage, rappel together down ropes into our midst on stage.

Initiation ceremony

There is a startling transition to the Act IV scene of "Double, double, toil and trouble/Fire burn, and cauldron bubble." The witches pounce upon the banquet table where Macbeth's guests retreated after Banquo's ghost made an uninvited appearance. The witches violently strike all the dinnerware off the table except the vessel that becomes their "charmed pot" for bubbling potions. When Macbeth appears, and begins his "I conjure you" speech, he is force-fed the brew and smeared with black paint, initiated as if he were the fourth witch.

The further equivocating prophesies— that Macbeth cannot be killed by a man born of woman, and that he will be safe 'til Burnam Wood comes to Dunsinane— come through the voices of the apparitions, whose faces appear frighteningly real via the use of backlight.

Comic relief

The heightened terror had its respite in a delightfully comic offering from Ames Adamson as the drunken Porter at the gate of hell, and later in the novel setting of Malcolm and Macduff as exiles discussing a return to bloody Scotland amidst the secure comforts of a sunlit park in England. The setting's contrast is jarring but appropriate (indeed Macbeth later refers derisively to the "English epicures"), even if this southern refuge from tyranny is punctuated by a touch of menace in the form of a circling bicycle rider and musician, who might be spying on these exiles.

Set designer Mimi Lien and lighting designer Tyler Micoleau provide the indeterminate space and shades of darkness wherein spirit and mortal worlds can move freely and menacingly. The bi-level set presents at stage level a catacomb of steel I-beams framing tormented souls, and an upper level where mayhem and murder traverse a more distanced space. The costumes of Oana Botez-Ban don't get mired in period dress but smartly span different eras with a coherence of appealing design.

This is a Macbeth to return to.♦


To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.
To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.