How it’s (New York) New Jersey: Shakespeare Theatre of NJ consistently presents some
of the most interesting work in the area.
How it’s (Irish) English and Scottish: Macbeth is so Scottish it’s usually called “The Scottish Play” by superstitious Thespians (including me). Shakespeare, of course, was English.
Autumn leaves blow around the steps to the F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theatre, home to the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, as you make your way in to see the production of Macbeth. The Drew University campus, with its tall trees and long shadows, is the perfect setting for Shakespeare’s dark fable of ambition and terror, and witches.
The witches have the last laugh — cackle? — at the excellent production of Macbeth at Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, which closes Nov. 17.
The chant
Double, double oil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble,
is so well known it’s become part of our common Halloween Witcheypoo heritage. But who or what are they, these Weird Sisters (with long beards, according to Shakespeare), who interrupt war hero Macbeth on his way home and predict that he will be Thane of Cawdor… and more.
In this production from director Brian B.Crowe, the new artistic director of STNJ, following the resignation of Bonnie J. Monte, the witches are tempters, consciences, demons, dark angels, witnesses.
Most of all, witnesses.
At each step down the dark road to power and temptation, the witches watch, knowingly, gleefully.
It’s a bold directorial choice and it entirely works.
The story is about how an ambitious general, Macbeth, hearing a prophecy about himself that comes true, decides on the perilous plan to murder the king who gives him that new title– and become king himself.
Macbeth is Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy, and zips along with the understated power of a Scottish Murder Ballad: things happen with no time to breathe or understand and it’s only in the pause after the scene that you catch up and figure out what was that? (think of those ballads where a boy and girl are walking along and then he suddenly kills her and it’s only when the song ends that you realize oh right, she was pregnant…)
Crowe keeps that spare taut feel to the play, aided by Set Designer Brian Ruggaber’s an abstracted set of woody panels, muted, sometimes eerie costumes by Rodrigo Munoz (the witches in particular meld into the set and truly disappear into it at times), and unsettling music, with sound design by Melanie Chen Cole. The moody lights by Andrew Hungerford add to the ghost story feel of it all (there is, in fact, a ghost).
Yet the play never feels rushed. All the poetry and even the rare moments of humor are there, along with the pathos. Where some productions of Macbeth really underscore the military ambition (like the 2010 movie starring Patrick Stewart, which clearly suggests an Eastern European Totalitarian takeover), this one is driven by the gleeful and accusatory presence of those watching witches.
It’s not their fault that Macbeth (handsome and lively Ray Fisher) is so damned easy to damn.
It’s not their fault that they like their jobs.
I mean someone has to do it.
The story is straightforward enough: Three witches waylay Macbeth coming home from a battle and congratulate him on becoming Thane of Cawdor… and King hereafter.
When King Duncan (Earl Baker, Jr., who also plays the dpctpr_ tells him the Thane of Cawdor has died and Macbeth will have his title, Macbeth falls headfirst into a nightmare of ambition. Since one prophecy is true, all must be. He writes to his ambitious wife, and the two make plans to kill Duncan when Duncan stays with them.
Lady Macbeth likes this plan a lot, and even shames her husband into seeing it through when he feels like backing out. But as played by Erin Partin, Lady Macbeth is high-spirited
and happy– she gets a kind of rush from the idea of the murder– and just as easily upset. She didn’t bargain for a husband who starts to see ghosts, who sets spies on friends, who doesn’t confide in her.
She starts to go crazy.
And every time Macbeth makes a choice , the witches watch. They watch when he kills his friend Banquo (played with sad wisdom by (R.J. Foster). And they look on when Macbeth begins to see things.
He reveals almost by chance that he’s set spies at the home of their friend Macduff, whose pregnant6 lady (Aurea Tomeski, also Witch 2) Lady Macbeth had welcomed. None of this was in Lady Macbeth’s plan.
Shakespeare’s 1623 play is full of oddities: some people even think it was cursed, and that Shakespeare found some real witchcraft for it (this is why theatre people won’t say the name in a theatre unless they are doing the play). It was written during the reign of King James I of England, who was also King James VI of Scotland. These oddities sometimes get cut: a strange interlude from the goddess Hecate. A vision of the sons of Banquo, who will be kings of England (written to flatter James somehow?). A “porter” scene that adds graveyard humor, and the brutal killing of the wife and children of Macduff.
Crowe keeps them all and the play is richer for it. In his production, Hecate, the queen of the witchess, actually possesses Lady Macbeth, after a disastrous dinner party in which Macbeth melts down as he sees the ghost of his murdered friend. Hecate speaks to her coven, telling them that Macbeth will choose to go even further down the wrong path– just in case there’s any doubt about his ability to control his fate.
Lady Macbeth comes to just as the witches point at her hand. She lets out a bloodcurdling scream.
Intermission.
It’s that hand that Lady Macbeth can’t ever get clean, the one she washes in her sleep, saying “out, out, damned spot,” and “who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him.”
The production’s fairy-tale quality throbs with solid performances, especially from Clark Carmichael as Macduff, ultimately Macbeth’s nemesis, and the witches Fisher’s Macbeth is a bit shouty at first but quickly relaxes into the role; his physical strength makes his mental deterioration all the shillier.
But best (worst?) of all are those grotesque witches ((Ellie Gossage, Aurea Tomeski, Felix Mayes). holding their fingers at odd angles.
We watch as they eat the hearts of men.
And see right through them.
