Full of Sound and Fury

Portland, Oregon’s Northwest Classical Theater Company (NWCTC) is currently offering a dramatic, dynamic staging of Shakespeare’s classic horror show, Macbeth, at the Shoe Box Theater. This modern-dress production emphasizes the “sound and fury” of the Scottish Play, serving up an audience-pleasing assortment of sex, swordfights, strobe lights, murder, witchcraft, and lopped-off heads. Audiences today aren’t that much different from our groundling brethren 400 years back: we like our sex and violence, and we like lots of it.

Brian Allard, the director, notes in the program: “Shakespeare sure knew how to put on a show.” So does Allard. As soon as Lady Macbeth enters stage right wearing peak-a-boo negligee, you know this is not your sainted aunt’s Shakespeare. But it’s not a cleverer-than-thou postmodern treatment, either—all the violence and viscera, drama and angst, witches and black magic can be found smack dab in the first folio. This is just the PG-13 version.

Though this was my first NWCTC experience, Macbeth showcases what seems to be the ethos of the company: to make classical theater come alive. The Shoe Box Theater is appropriately named—the space is almost claustrophobically intimate—and the actors work what could be a handicap to their advantage by incorporating the audience rather than ignoring them. (Theater-goers are even offered complementary cheese & crackers during the play’s banquet scene). During moments of introspection, certain characters engage the audience directly, as if we’d become conspirators as well as confidantes, briefly granted access to minds very seriously diseased. In a play as macabre and psychologically intense as Macbeth, a smaller, stripped-down space can feel appropriate to the No Exit-like atmosphere of the play, creating a palpable sense of existential dread.

Despite the limited space, many of the scenes are inventively staged, with priority given to physicality and drama over intellectual or abstract concepts. (The company’s motto is, accordingly, “Content over Concept!”) The reading of Lady Macbeth’s incantation, “Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here…” takes the Bard at his word: Lady M is conjuring unfriendly spirits to aid in her diabolical quest for the crown. She chalks a circle-inscribed pentagram by flickering candlelight as she intones the chilling words: “Come to my woman’s breasts, and take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers…” The effect is visceral, unnerving. An inspired moment arrives later, when Macbeth echoes his wife’s incantation with his own revised version : “Come, seeling night, scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day…” and Allard suggests that Macbeth and his Lady have effectively switched roles: he’s the possessed one now, even as Lady M’s sanity grows increasingly brittle.

I remember Allison Anderson as a member of our beloved Tygres Heart Shakespeare company—she was an excellent Ophelia in that company’s masterful staging of Hamlet many years ago (ah, in that gorgeous blood-red Winningstad theater). Here she hardly plays an “unsexed” Lady Macbeth; she’s a far sight oversexed in fact, as much turned-on by the sight of her hubby lathered in Duncan’s blood as turned-off. Anderson’s Lady M is a film noir femme fatale, using her sexuality like a weapon to threaten, disarm, and manipulate her smitten husband. Watching this production, I was reminded of Harold Bloom’s observation that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are the happiest married couple in all of Shakespeare. Or they at least have the most active sex life.

The Weird Sisters are also sexualized, played more as sirens than witches—seductive, soul-sucking succubi instead of the bearded hags usually depicted. They ensnare Macbeth by appealing in part to his masculine vanity. Paul Angelo “struts and frets his hour upon the stage” as Macbeth. He’s a Macbeth hell-bent on proving his masculinity, especially to his ball-breaking wife. “I dare do all that may become a man,” he insists to her, “who dare do more is none.” Angelo plays Macbeth as a conflicted, brooding sort of soldier “bound in to saucy doubts and fears,” and a little too eager to believe his own press: (“Macbeth shall never vanquish’d be til Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane”—yeah, right). He’s blustery and ripe for a take-down by the end, but we can’t help but feel pity for the poor, trapped guy when he admits to us and himself:

That which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; but, in their stead,
Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath,
Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.

It’s a sad, intimate moment made even more moving and immediate by the close proximity to actors the audience is privileged to in the Shoebox Theater. I’m very much looking forward to more Shakespeare from this spirited troupe of PDX players.

The Shoe Box Theater is located at 2110 SE 10th Ave.
Performances of Macbeth run through June 3rd.

Visit the company’s website here.