Mac Beth

I have seen enough mediocre-to-bad high-concept productions of Shakespeare's plays to shudder at the very idea of "high-concept." Then along comes Mac Beth, the amazing Red Bull Production adapted and directed by Erica Schmidt, and high concept suddenly looks like an excellent--no, brilliant--idea.

Isabelle Furhman and Ismenia Mendes
Photo: Carol Rosegg

Seven schoolgirls act out Macbeth in a vacant lot featuring a beat-up couch, an old bathtub, puddles, and some grass. There's no preamble; they jump right in.  Their performances are contemporary and young and present the themes and emotions of Macbeth in a new and fresh way. And, although virtually all of the words are Shakespeare's, Mac Beth also focuses on the lives of contemporary teenage girls and the fervor of their emotions and loyalties.

Schmidt directs Mac Beth as a whirlwind of a show; it is always compelling, frequently funny, and occasionally chilling. The cast of young women is astonishingly good, led by Isabelle Fuhrman as the too-easily-influenced Macbeth and Ismenia Mendes as a driving, intimidating Lady Macbeth. In Schmidt's hands, the Macbeths' interactions mirror teenage peer pressure along with adolescent testing of power, limits, and sexuality. It's almost like watching two plays at once, and the show is downright thrilling when the parts coalesce. (However, this would not be a good version for people seeing Macbeth for the first time. Some of the dialogue is lost in the general tumult, and it is not always clear who is playing whom.)

Years ago, there was a stir when Kenneth Branagh was nominated for a best screenplay Oscar for his film of Hamlet even though he had used Shakespeare's play verbatim. This of course brought up questions of what direction adds to a story, what is considered to be writing, and so on. This Mac Beth is listed as "by William Shakespeare" in the program, "adapted and directed by Erica Schmidt."
Yet Schmidt has brought so much that is new and unique to this production that I would have no problem with the credits reversed: "written and directed by Erica Schmidt, based on the play by William Shakespeare."

Wendy Caster
(third row, press ticket)
Show-Score: 90

Macbeth

Experimental approaches to well-known plays can sometimes pay off in enormous ways. The National Theatre of Scotland's production of Macbeth, currently at the Barrymore, made me think of a whole bunch of productions that have, at some point or another, thrilled me with their wonderful weirdness. There was the production of Ibsen's Ghosts that I saw as a kid at Carnegie-Mellon University, which scared the shit out of me, and which featured life-sized voodoo dolls, a stage filled with dirt, and a huge, creepy, empty auditorium. There was the Mabou Mines production of Ibsen's A Doll's House, cast with men under four feet tall and statuesque blonde women (one of whom got totally naked at the end, and turned out to be bald). There was The Donkey Show, Diane Paulus's hilarious 1970s take on A Midsummer Night's Dream, set in an abandoned dance club in the very westernmost reaches of Chelsea. There was John Doyle's Company, which highlighted Bobby's isolation by having every character but him play their own musical instruments. I recognize that some of you might've hated some of these productions, and it's fine with me if you did, but they all totally bent my brain in really good ways.

Then again, new twists on old favorites can end up feeling gimmicky and pointless, and I've sat through plenty of those productions, too. I still can't figure out the production of Measure for Measure that I saw, also at CMU, which featured a cast of actors clothed in smeary, filthy tatters and wandering blankly through the audience as they delivered their lines in near monotones. A production of Tosca set during World War II was....Tosca with 1940s style suits and dresses. I understand what Baz Luhrmann has been trying to do since, like, he was born, but I've never really connected with his work nonetheless. Last year, I saw a college production of Pippin that re-imagined the title character as a soldier suffering from severe Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which was way, way more adorable than its overly committed cast of very young adults clearly intended it to be.

And then there's this production of Macbeth, which I'd place somewhere squarely in the middle. The gimmick: it is set in a mental institution, where Alan Cumming--a severely disturbed patient who has experienced (maybe caused?) something horribly traumatic that has resulted in a psychotic break--has been committed. A man and a woman in white coats observe him, and occasionally take part in his delusions, as he portrays every major character in the Shakespeare tragedy.