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Power couple: Mary Jane Hanson (top) with
Stickney in Macbeth. |
Cackle
and Caw
By
James Yeara
Macbeth
By
William Shakespeare, directed by Elizabeth Swain
New York State Theatre Institute, through Feb. 13
‘Confusion
has now made his masterpiece!”—Macduff
Director Elizabeth Swain begins her Macbeth fantastically:
A leaf-gobo- dappled stage greets the audience, and then all
goes to black, accompanied by Will Severin’s ominously eerie
electronic music redolent of several fantasy films (300,
Jason and the Argonauts). Suddenly a spotlight from
above hits what appear to be piles of dead leaves center stage,
while a white light glows from beneath them. Soon the dead
brown piles move with the music, an arm emerges, then another,
and the most famous opening lines of the “cursed” play are
spoken: “When shall we three meet again/In thunder, lightning,
or in rain?”
New York State Theatre Institute’s production of Shakespeare’s
shortest tragedy is what NYSTI does best: present accessible
literature to a broad audience in the most comfortable way
possible. The fantastic costumes by Robert Anton are a mix
of the very model of a modern military (black boots, black
cargo pants and shirts or coveralls and vests) and medieval
(purple capes and gold crowns, colorful on-shoulder swaths
of cloth, bucklers and broadswords). Anton’s set consists
of twin curved staircases, recycled from NYSTI’s past productions
of The Lark and Magna Carta, rising to a platform
up center, the stage ringed by two-story stone walls.
The premise of Shakespeare’s Macbeth is familiar to
New York state 10th graders who have at least read the CliffsNotes:
Macbeth follows his ambition to kill his king, Duncan, and
rule Scotland in his place, encouraged in his pursuits by
his Lady Macbeth and the three “Weird Sisters” who equivocate
Macbeth into a bloody, short reign of terror. That the historical
Macbeth is not the betrayer and butcher of Shakespeare’s Jacobean
propaganda matters little; the play’s the thing, and Timothy
D. Stickney makes for the ideal butcher-king here. Surrounded
by familiar NYSTI faces and voices, each out- gesticulating
and out-shouting each other, the dreadlocked Stickney is an
imposing figure, dashing about the clear half-arc downstage
of the twin staircases, following the toplighting during the
imaginary-dagger-of-the-mind soliloquy as if the meandering
toplight were an escaped Tinkerbell, which conveniently turns
red when Macbeth’s thoughts turn bloody. Equally fantastical
is Macbeth staring wide-eyed at the empty banquet-hall bench
where he alone sees Banquo’s ghost, here absent save for some
eerie yellow “haunted house” top light that comes and goes.
Swain’s production is full of such fantastical touches: After
the magnificent opening, the witches soon take on the familiar
cackle of Snow White’s stepmother; King Duncan seems to be
so struck with fairy-tale palsy enfeeblement and old age that
his halting steps would be halted forever if the Macbeths
had just given a sudden loud “boo” instead of resorting to
the superfluous gore of the daggers; the adding of cat calls,
owl hoots, and raven caws are the aural equivalent of PowerPoint
bullets to the words, and add to the “Agatha Christie meets
Walt Disney in Chamber of Horrors” tone here; and the frenzy
of what the folks at Shakespeare and Company call “the Richard
Burton-Stratford shout” makes the very air of the Schacht
Fine Arts Center echo with sibilance.
There’s a nice turn by NYSTI stalwart John Romeo as the bawdy
Porter, who actually sneaks in one of the few bawdy gestures
ever seen in a NYSTI production during the Porter’s speech
on the equivocating effects of drinks. Some performers are
recycled in multiple roles, while others are mere walking
shadows, and the production as a whole seems unexplored and
underused, as if it weren’t just the audience that needed
the PowerPoint bullets of the lights and caws. This might
make for a nice introduction to Shakespeare, but after 2 hours
and 30 minutes, you won’t long for the crows to screech any
longer.
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