The treatment of the witches was, on the whole, the best I've seen. The costumes--nuns acting as army nurses--were perfect: so clearly not the sleek women of Mac's world, but also immediately conveying a sense of special knowledge, of connection to the mysteries of life and death. The surgical masks even made Banquo's line about their beards make sense, for maybe the first time in any production since the first one. I didn't entirely agree with the cauldron scene; there was no actual cauldron and they simply chanted the lines at breakneck speed, which seemed a loss in a hospital/morgue setting that would have allowed for them to be mixing some sort of creepy pharmacopeia. Having the cadavers act as the apparitions: good, especially since that's another effect that's really almost impossible to do well.
An iambic fundamentalist, to use Peter Hall's phrase, would have had issue with some of the direction, which let the actors play rather loose with the verse. I found myself thinking a couple of times of the dictum "Earn your pauses." This was not so much because the performances were extraordinarily self-indulgent--they weren't, not at all--as because the women's room, despite the fact that this was a very large theater just off Broadway, contained a grand total of four stalls. (This seat-to-seat ratio, so to speak, would get a theater shut down in Chicago.) At intermission the line stretched up a long flight of stairs, down an aisle of the house, and then back up the aisle again. So I waited the whole 15 minutes, but did not get to pee. That part of the experience makes me think that if I ever direct again I will exhort the actors to remember the woman in the seventh row who did not get to pee at intermission: You can keep your pause if it is good enough to make her forget about her bladder.
Stewart himself was terrific. I've never heard anyone hit the ands in "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow," but it totally worked that way: Mac resigning himself to an endless, dreary future. And of course the verse supports it; those are stressed syllables.
Lady M--I don't have the actress's name handy--was excellent too. This is one of my dream roles, and I'm calling her excellent without qualification or resentment, so you know she was good.
Joe and I both had issue with the Porter--such a departure from the text that it must have been a directorial choice rather than an acting choice. It just doesn't work to play that scene as anything other than comical. Making the Porter a sinister security guard fits within this production, sure, but it still doesn't work with the text. Or at least, it didn't this way. So many of those lines are so clearly the Porter riffing to amuse himself; this was sort of the Porter riffing to put words in the mouths of the audience members he was interrogating, without a hint of actual play, and it just seemed sociopathic. Maybe I've never recovered from seeing it done exceedingly well in college, with Dan Sullivan--one of the most natural clowns I've ever known--in the role.
Anyway. I need to head to bed--I have not been sleeping enough, and I don't want a discussion of Macbeth to murder sleep. But I do want to mention that when Cannibal Cheerleaders on Crack was first being staged in Chicago (almost ten years before I was in it, so, god, around 1989?) the cast used to gather backstage before shows and sing, to a tune resembling "Row, Row, Row Your Boat":
Macbeth, Macbeth, Macbeth, Macbeth
Good luck, good luck, good luck
Have a good show, have a good show
Macbeth, Macbeth, Macbeth! [whistle]
That show was all about flying in the face of tradition, so it was perfect. (Then again, when I was in it, one actor entered running, hit a pool of fake blood, and slid all the way off the edge of the stage, so who's to say the curse wasn't in effect?) But in general, do I believe in that superstition? Yeah. Partly because other people believe it, so if they hear you say "Macbeth" backstage they're thrown off their game, and the show can be affected that way. Partly because the college production of the show, despite being a joy to work on, was one of the most cursed productions I've ever been a part of (a smoke machine that stubbornly refused to work for the cauldron scene, but belched out swampy mists for the interior scenes; a murderer's cape catching fire on stage; the wind picking up a giant metal tray from the banquet scene and blowing it down three stories of stone steps, with tremendous clangor, during a show; and so on). Partly because when I was 18 I'd somehow never heard about the superstition, and before a show--this of The Beggar's Opera--a castmate enlightened me and another cast member. This other cast member promptly said, "Oh, that's BS. Macbeth, Macbeth, Macbeth." And of course that night's show was the one where everything went wrong--where a woman entered with blood running down her forehead because a trapdoor had just landed on her head. Maybe it is all self-fulfilling prophecy, but who cares? You lose nothing by believing, and you get to share in the spooky collective mystery of theater.
