Half-Baked Bloodbath: Macbeth @ Seattle Shakespeare Co.
Seattle Shakespeare Co.'s Macbeth
Seattle Center House, Tickets $32 - $22
Thurs - Sun, through April 8
We loved this Macbeth's brutal, intense fight choreography (by Gordon Carpenter) -- swords clang, guys vault over the sets, thump to the ground and wrestle, hell, a baby gets stabbed. It was like the IFL onstage. That's gonna be a pretty bruised-up cast by the time this thing closes.
On one hand, the performance as a whole is so uneven we're on the fence about recommending it -- when the actors come loose from the text's emotional current, the soliloquies blow up like thought balloons. On the other, it got a big ovation opening night, and it's gripping to see Hans Altwies struggling to shape his own Macbeth.
Ah, screw it, you're on your own.
This "chamber" Macbeth that SSC is doing has been shortened, smaller roles merged into one -- it's a 2-hour close-up of blood-spotted Lady Macbeth (Jennifer Sue Johnson) and her blood-drenched husband (Hans Altwies).
This Macbeth shit is hard, and Altwies -- while he mines some black humor in dry, sardonic asides -- didn't persuade us that he'd have his best friend's throat cut without the stage directions calling for it. And why are he and his lady so freaking horny all the time? He and Johnson are better on the downslope, gutting it out as their dreams burn down around them.
What a director needs to do with Macbeth is help the cast find the brutal, bloody heart of its ambition, stick with it, and discover how the intensity of Shakespeare's language keeps an audience hanging on every word. But Russ Banham wants Lady Macbeth's:
Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty!
...recited like an incantation outtake from The Omen.
In the director's notes we noted how Banham fails to understand how a play works, trots out the word "deconstructing," and employs the phrase "to wit" (which made us want to brain him with a heavy goblet). Having dug up the historical backstory -- that Lady Macbeth had good reasons, et cetera -- he says he's decided the witches make great shamans, so he'll be drawing on pre-Colombian shamanism.
But consider that: 1) Historical backstory is worthless. What matters is what's in the play. Plays come with the important exposition built in, for the audience to react to in real-time -- otherwise plays could come with the first act printed in the program, and be much shorter.
And 2) Macbeth is 400 years old and going strong. It doesn't need "extra" help to win over an audience.
There's also a significant interpretative inconsistency in insisting that "what really happened" in Scotland in 1000-something A.D. should affect how you see these characters, sprinkling in some Central American shamanism, and then yattering on about setting the play "in no particular place or time."
To close on an high note, though, the scene with Banquo's ghost was outstanding, incorporating the audience as the dinner guests. It was shaman-free. It was even ghost-free. It was Macbeth's hallucination alone, his wife trying desperately to cover for him -- a scene a nervy, edgy Johnson sells perfectly. It turns out there's still not much eerier than seeing someone go crazy right in front of you.
Photo of Hans Altwies (Macbeth) by Erik Stuhaug
