Double, double, this Macbeth is in trouble

Allyn Burrows reacts to slashing something - maybe the text?

I don't know why, but Macbeth seems to drive the Actors' Shakespeare Project crazy.  Their last version of it was an all-female free-for-all that cut the play to ribbons and was pretty much completely incoherent.  And while there are some boys on stage this time, once again a strange kind of feminine hysteria hovers over the production, and needless to say, the play has been cut to ribbons and is pretty much completely incoherent.

Sigh.  Local affection for actress Paula Plum, who directed this disaster (for the record, I love her as much as anybody as an actress) will no doubt lead to misleadingly positive notices for this turkey.  But I'm warning you, do not believe her middle-aged fanboys!  This talented lady is over her head here, I'm afraid, and her dude-posse - yeah, nice guys all, I know - should really be reviewing the Patriots rather than Shakespeare.

I will admit there's a method to Plum's madness - let's call it back-story mania. And the back-story she has made the backbone of her Macbeth is Lady M's, not her hubby's.  Now decades ago, when I was in college, the question "How many children had Lady Macbeth?" was considered evidence of amusing aesthetic naiveté.  But basically that's the question Plum has built her production around.

For those not familiar with this particular text, that notorious query stems from one stanza that sticks out from Lady's M's murderous suggestions to Macbeth like a sore thumb (given that there are no kids in evidence at Dunsinane):

I have given suck, and know 
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me: 
I would, while it was smiling in my face, 
Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums, 
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn 
As you have done to this.

It's memorable, isn't it - and essentially evidence of Lady M's mad, willful stripping away of all feminine feeling.  She has already called on the fates to "un-sex" her, and elsewhere she taunts her husband with the jibe that a real man would have no problem committing murder.  Now she tells us her vaunting ambition has pushed her beyond even any maternal feeling (surely the deepest instinct of the species).

This being Shakespeare, of course, those lines resonate and echo throughout the play; part of what makes the canon great is the way in which its texts operate not merely as narratives but as webs of thematic investigation.  And here sterility and gender and power are at the center of Shakespeare's concerns - only not at all in the way Plum imagines.

For clearly the Macbeths' vanished spawn are yet another example of those Shakespearean lacunae (like the disappearance of the Fool in Lear) that are meant to tease us subconsciously; what's more, they're just one more facet of an incredibly wide mosaic: the Macbeths themselves may be sexy as hell, but they're childless, and so essentially sterile - while the Witches, Banquo tells us, are genderless: both men and women (and not quite either), they play with strangled babes, and the blood of animals that have eaten their litters.  Meanwhile Macduff, the only person who can kill Macbeth, is "not of woman born" (and he is only able to do so once his own children are slain, and thus he also has become "sterile").  And we note that Malcolm, who replaces Macbeth on the throne, is a virgin, "yet unknown to woman" - while Banquo's issue only joins the royal lineage once he himself is dead.

So the grim sterility of power is one of the cruxes of Macbeth - those among its characters who would tempt or tamper with the political fates are almost always "sterilized" as a result.  Perhaps Plum understands this, but she turns these concerns into a strange, neurotic back-story for Lady M that pulls focus from the actual drama and adds nothing to our understanding of the play.  She actually opens the production with a confusing funeral (later we realize it must have been for that babe who so tenderly milked our leading lady), and then keeps Lady M around in scenes she's not in, listening via radio to the battles of Act I (the production is set, to some positive effect, somewhere after - or during? - World War I).  But alas, the nuns who attended that initial interment stick around too, and turn out to be our Three Witches, and this proves a disastrous choice - nuns these days simply come with too much comic baggage, and of course Plum has to slash their lines to the bone to dodge all the pagan references, and keep her Catholic-school conceit going.

But then she can't keep her hands off the text in general - I'd say the play has been cut by a third; I actually lost track of all the great lines that are missing, even though incredibly, somehow the whole thing still clocks in at two and half hours!  (How'd they do that?)  What's more, Plum has re-arranged things at will, so sometimes missing speeches pop back in when you least expect them.  And needless to say, she has made several male characters, like Banquo and Macduff's son, female because - well, just because, you know, women and stuff!  Oh, and Banquo seems to be a Red Cross volunteer - what?

While watching all this, I admit I had no idea what Plum thought she was plumbing; luckily, she has provided her own exegesis in the program notes, where you can read that she was inspired by Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudon, which of course has absolutely nothing to do with Macbeth (but which did inspire Ken Russell's The Devils).  The director also writes that she was greatly influenced by a player piano she came across in the pit of the theatre.

O-kay!  No wonder Allyn Burrows, probably this troupe's most reliable actor, seems to have checked out as Macbeth until the last act (where he does finally show some life, to be fair). If only Mara Sidmore had followed suit - she's capable of a much better Lady M. than the melodramatic caricature Plum has drawn from her here; but then I get the impression she and her director were involved in a kind of folie à deux during rehearsal.  The witches, for their part, are helpless before their gi-normous wimples, but some of the boys get some traction when they're left alone. The skillful Richard Snee made a wry Porter, and James Andreassi understood that it's best to underplay Macduff's grief; meanwhile Ross MacDonald managed an intriguing (if minimal) profile as Ross.  The surprise was newcomer Edmund Donovan, who actually pulled off Malcolm's impossible speeches in Act 4.  Indeed, oddly, this trickiest of all scenes in Macbeth - which I've never actually seen work before - was probably the strongest sequence in this addled production.

You know, I'll vent a little further here, probably because I just saw an exciting production of Hamlet from London that featured actors no more talented than we have here in Boston.  Honestly, between Allyn Burrows, Ross MacDonald, James Andreassi, Edmund Donovan, Joel Colodner, Nigel Gore, Johnny Lee Davenport, Bill Barclay, Benjamin Evett, Richard Snee, Steven Barkhimer, Michael Forden Walker, Maurice Parent and Gabriel Kuttner, among others - not to mention Marianna Bassham, Marya Lowry, Obehi Janice, and Ms. Plum herself  - we have a fine troupe of Shakespeareans in Boston.  You could do just about every goddamn play in the canon with these people. So why can't ASP pull it together more often than they do???  Seriously, I'm just frustrated by now - how do these wacky, half-baked misfires keep happening? Clearly internal politics, bad castings, and variable direction often undo the troupe's best intentions.  Or is their very M.O. - that the actors call the shots - fundamentally flawed, perhaps actually as fallible as the model behind the ART's dreadful old director-driven Shakespearean train wrecks?  Can these good actors ever admit that they need better, stronger direction?  Oh, who knows - in the meantime, let's just blame Aldous Huxley, or maybe that player piano . . .

Should they all have hailed Macbeth?

Honey, where's the ketchup? Kate Fleetwood and Patrick Stewart clean up in the kitchen.

I know, what's done cannot be undone; still, I wish someone had thrown some sort of critical obstruction in the way of Patrick Stewart's Macbeth, now at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; they might have spared me $100 and an evening of rock-concert-level aural histrionics. But the critics spoke with almost one voice (except for Leonard Jacobs over at the Clyde Fitch Report): "fearsome insight and theatrical fire" (NY Times); "inspired . . . frenzied . . . symphonic" (The New Yorker); "directorial inventiveness matched by brilliant acting" (The Guardian).

To be fair, some of the gush is understandable, because this Macbeth is, indeed, brilliantly staged by director Rupert Goold, who crams in coups de théâtre almost cheek-by-jowl. As you probably know by now, the show conjures a kind of British Stalinist dystopia via a chilly, Saw-esque hospital/kitchen set, which the three witches prowl relentlessly as nurses, technicians, or cooks. Some of Goold's gambits, are, alas, ridiculous - as when the witches start to rap - but many others are sublime, including the weird sisters' dispatch of the Bloody Captain, the appearance/disappearance of Banquo's ghost, and the video projections of Birnam Wood (into which Malcolm's army vanishes in its camouflage fatigues).

But staging tricks can only get you so far, even when they come at you with such distracting rapidity (and volume). The sad truth is that Patrick Stewart makes a weatheredly sexy but emotionally flat Macbeth, and the seemingly-more-able Kate Fleetwood (perhaps as a result) basically flails about as Lady M, and no amount of rock-show fog or spurting blood can obscure that. Stewart seems to have taken a kind of whimsical nihilism as the be-all and end-all of his portrayal - which leads to a few intriguingly insightful laughs toward the finish, but little more; essentially, his arc is drastically foreshortened, then toyed with for two hours. We hear little of Macbeth's famous poetry (he's arguably Shakespeare's most poetic hero), and see even less of his descent into savagery; it's all cool, slightly cracked business-as-usual for Stewart, whom we half-expect to hear tell his murderous henchmen, "Make it so!" Stewart even willfully restyled Macbeth's final moment into a kind of suicide, which of course was all of a piece with his earlier despair - but, um, isn't change the essence of drama? Somehow I thought so. As for Fleetwood, I'd love to see her do this role again - she has a strikingly icy gonzo hauteur - only perhaps against an actor who can relate to her onstage. There was, in fact, only one memorable performance in the show - Michael Feast made a dramatic feast of Macduff, expertly articulating the most difficult moment in the text (Macduff's reaction to the news of his murdered children), and remaining intriguingly vulnerable to Macbeth's foul fiend to the finish. Now his is a Macbeth I'd like to see, but I suppose he'll have to pilot a television show - or maybe a starship - before I get the chance.

Sisters are doin' it for themselves

Marya Lowry returns from Duncan's murder in Macbeth.

All the local critics have hailed the Actors' Shakespeare Project's "all-girl" Macbeth (through November 18 at BU's Studio 102), as we've been trained to do now, almost reflexively, when we meet with gender experimentation in the arts. The trouble is, to my mind the production is rather troubled itself, and actually doesn't probe too deeply into the gender issues of Macbeth - just as last season, the ASP's all-male Titus Andronicus didn't get much farther in the gender studies department, either (though it was on the whole a stronger production) - while Boston Theatreworks' highly-praised Midsummer, which switched the genders of Titania and Oberon, likewise got little traction in its sex role mash-up. What's going on here? Same-sex Shakespeare is obviously a trend - only it's not really doing what everyone pretends: that is, examining and subverting gender.

Perhaps this is simply because Shakespeare does that already - indeed, his plays were designed to be performed by one gender in "disguise" - so the professorial overlay of gender "issues" somehow feels redundant. Of course it makes perfect classroom sense that since the female roles are "constructed" in Shakespeare (and in his own day were even played by men), the system can plausibly be reversed, with women "constructing" the men's roles. But alas, without a female Shakespeare in the offing, what this actually means in performance remains murky - indeed, it seems (so far) to simply mean that people try it, and then other people applaud, regardless of the outcome.

Which isn't to say that gender is not a central concern of Macbeth - just that its critique of gender fits uncomfortably with postmodern feminist tropes. Not that Shakespeare doesn't stick it to the men, and masculinity in general (he does, and how; indeed, has any female author produced as deep a critique of women as Shakespeare has of men?) - it's that, as usual, his analysis of the gender dynamic leads in surprising directions.

Shakespeare, for instance, is not much interested in personal sexual empowerment, for men or women - and even less interested in sex as recreation, or lifestyle enhancement. Sex leads to coupledom in Shakespeare, which leads implicitly to domesticity and children. It's a little shocking to realize that there is no positive example of a Don Juan figure in the whole canon - no romanticized rover, no happy heartbreaker, no babe magnet - and that Shakespeare's heroes, though often flawed, always submit to their woman in the end (even Kate and Petruchio basically strike a deal). Indeed, the submission of masculine energy to feminine guidance is probably the central lesson of Shakespeare's comedy.

Needless to say, this balance goes awry in the tragedies - yet feminists often seem incapable of seeing exactly why and how this is true. It's taken as a given, for instance, in most feminist constructions, that the "weird sisters" in Macbeth are women - yet there's more than a hint that they're actually something else (my favorite vision of them is by Alexander Marie-Colin, at left). When Banquo first encounters them, he gasps:

- What are these,
So wither'd and wild in their attire
That look not like inhabitants of the earth
And yet are on't? . . . you should be women,
And yet your beards forbid me to interpet
That you are so.

Those beards are often forgotten in production, but they're a telling detail in a play that's obsessed with death and sterility. The "weird sisters" are both male and female, double-gendered - or rather, outside the "natural" order of gender. We should recall this detail as Lady Macbeth, while psychologically preparing to murder Duncan, cries out to the spirit world:

. . . unsex me here
And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full
Of direst cruelty!

She is not asking to be masculinized (as other Shakespearean heroines do when faced with their powerlessness); she is asking to be un-sexed, removed from gender entirely - and thus pulled from the cycle of reproductive destiny. This is "empowering," yes, but only in a sterilizing way; as she and Macbeth struggle over their competing versions of "manhood" ("What man dare/I dare," Macbeth tellingly insists), she leaves unrevealed her awareness that her seduction will ultimately "un-man" him (note Ellen Terry crowns herself as Lady Macbeth, in John Singer Sargent's painting, above left).

Thus it's no surprise that the Macbeths, having stepped out of the natural order, can only be stopped by someone else outside said order - as the witches predict, "none of woman born/shall harm Macbeth." Macduff, it turns out, qualifies for the job, as he "was from his mother's womb/untimely ripp'd" - indeed, he's doubly qualified by the end of the play because his children have been killed; he, too, has been 'sterilized'.

Any successful production of Macbeth must make some account of this dynamic - a tough enough challenge with two genders in play, one would think. Still, it's possible that an all-female production could grapple with the issues honestly, rather than becoming punch-drunk with female empowerment - and at first the ASP version, which segues from the weird sisters' cries to Lady Macbeth screaming her way out of a nightmare, seems to have something like the right target in its sights. But director Adrienne Krstansky and her cast quickly lose any sense of thematic momentum. As Macbeth and his lady, Marya Lowry and Paula Plum (at left) have little sexual - or emotional - chemistry, and both seem to be groping for something, anything to play (Plum slides toward Noël Coward, while Lowry slips into a steady glare). Only Jacqui Parker pulls off a plausibly masculine comportment (as Banquo), while in several performances (Duncan and Ross, for example) it's hard to tell what the actresses are going for at all. And while the irregular playing space is handled imaginatively, the production mostly ducks the play's physical demands (its battles, murders, and relentless hand-to-hands).

What's most troubling is the high degree of editing; for some reason the text has been sliced and diced even more than Duncan. It's thus hard to buy the production as a "collaboration," as the ASP claims (since when do actresses "collaborate" away most of their lines?). Macbeth is already the shortest of Shakespeare's tragedies, but here it doesn't so much strut and fret its hour upon the stage as scramble pell-mell: minor characters are cut wholesale, Lady M's mad scene starts without its preamble, and Malcolm's pivotal scene with Macduff is stripped to just its spine. Even some of the famous soliloquies have been thinned out.

There are, it's true, some compensations. Marya Lowry gains her footing once Duncan's foul murder is accomplished (and she's essentially on her own). Her descent down the stairs of Studio 102 while staggering through "Macbeth hath murdered sleep," was suddenly gripping, and she held onto a dark, to-hell-in-a-handbasket hauteur till the end of the play. Plum, too, recovered somewhat in her mad scene, which had an intriguing time-warp subtext. Meanwhile Denise Cormier triumphed over her Madonna-concert costume (complete with power-boobs) in her big scene as Hecate, and fearlessly delivered her prophecies from a spread-eagled position (another moment where, briefly, the production touched down into the play's real concerns). Happily, Bobbie Steinbach made us forget about her weird take on Duncan by getting her laughs as the Porter (which is not so easy to do). And as with Titus, all should hail the design team - particularly Jeff Adelberg's striking lighting design, and David Wilson's evocative sound environment.

Still, in general the production remains a head-scratcher - as does the larger question of same-sex Shakespeare. How, exactly, should we approach these productions - and how should they approach the text? It would seem that in Shakespeare's day, when boys played girls, they attempted a high level of theatrical illusion, perhaps within a stylized framework somewhat like that of kabuki. Today's gender benders, however, make no such endeavor (as it generally seems to be harder for drag kings to pull off the deception than drag queens); the gender gap simply seems to be "the statement" in and of itself. Why this should be theatrically interesting, however (as opposed to politically interesting), remains an open question.