When shall we three meet again?

To compensate for their production last spring of Titus Andronicus with an all-male cast, Actors’ Shakespeare Project is putting on an all-female Macbeth this fall. We went to opening night, and the show needs a lot of work.

Some scenes are done beautifully, mostly in Acts IV and V. The second half opening with the witches is hair-raising and convincingly supernatural. The scene between Lady Macduff and her son before they are killed is a touching bit of normal human interaction, with Lady Macduff striking a perfect note of harried and distracted mother trying to answer her child’s endless questions. Lady Macbeth’s unbalanced and unseeing monologue is a more unified whole than it might be, with the commentary from the observing doctor and gentlewoman practically a voiceover. Our attention is kept correctly on Lady Macbeth as she paces and stumbles about the set, our and her recollections of misdeeds reinforced by her wandering through the places where we saw those misdeeds plotted, executed, or revealed. There is no safe place on the set for us or for her to escape the memories of violence, though that idea could have been further emphasized had she exited where the audience exits.

The cast is uneven, and not in the expected way given the mix of equity actors and college students. The best performer is Victoria Bucknell (Angus, Fleance, Macduff’s son, and Young Siward), a BU college student who sings beautifully, is expressive and comfortable with the language, and conveys very different characters through different movement choices that all seem natural. Marya Lowry (Macbeth), on the other hand, is an established actor with a broad résumé in regional Shakespeare performances. According to the program, she runs Ecstatic Voice and Lamentation workshops in the US and in Europe, and I saw her hold up her end as an interesting Gertrude in ASP’s Hamlet last fall against Johnnie Lee Davenport’s marvelous Claudius. I did not expect her sing-song obscuring of the language in this show, her single-note character who expresses emotion only through how she holds her hands and whether her eyes are wide open or wider open. I enjoy Shakespeare performances more when the actors make the language feel natural. The contrast in language is most noticeable when Marya Lowry is talking to Jacqui Parker’s Banquo, who speaks much more naturally and with far more range and clarity.

Jacqui Parker also shows more apparent awareness of her surroundings and fellow actors than most of the cast, though Victoria Bucknell is the only one who is consistently fully present when she is present. Through most of the show, actors on stage who are not immediately involved in the dialogue do not react to anything they see or hear. They stiffly await their cues, moving only when necessary and trying not to distract from the person speaking. It doesn’t feel like a directorial choice so much as directorial incompleteness (or incompetence), and the lack of response definitely inhibits the audience’s response. That’s disastrous when the theater is small and the audience surrounds most of the performance space.

Using an all-female cast in this play that most famously questions gender roles should add some layers of confusion, amusement, or irony. Instead, the directorial choices reinforce stereotypes of violence as inappropriate for women (either for women to perform or for audiences to see women performing). Weapons are replaced by vaguely bloody sponges, the battle between Macbeth and Macduff is quick and uses mimed swords, and the daggers used to kill Duncan are too-small kitchen knives. The violence in ASP’s Titus was even more stylized, using water for blood, but was far more effective. This production of Macbeth is not afraid of expressing sexuality or conflict, and even moves Lady Macduff’s death onto the stage, but pulls back from the violence of the show in an odd way.

I was really surprised that so little was made of the relevance of the show to the contemporary world, particularly given that Actors’ Shakespeare Project claims to present Shakespeare “as a playwright urgently relevant to our own times.” Ross certainly sounds like he is speaking of today’s political climate when he says to Lady Macduff:

I dare not speak
much further;
But cruel are the times, when we are traitors
And do not know ourselves, when we hold rumour
From what we fear, yet know not what we fear,
But float upon a wild and violent sea
Each way and move. I take my leave of you:
Shall not be long but I'll be here again:
Things at the worst will cease, or else climb upward
To what they were before.

Malcolm and Macduff explore the relative horror of unchecked lust and unchecked greed in a ruler, but Malcolm’s speech is too rushed to allow the audience to relish the obvious parallels to our recent and current rulers. The show’s broadest theme is a nation falling under tyranny, but we see little aspect or effect of that tyranny. Lady Macduff’s speech about whether the innocent have anything to fear in the present times is elided entirely, despite the compact way these few lines touch on the disconnect between action and consequences, the upsetting of logic and justice, and even the gender issues that this production should be exploring:

Whither should I fly?
I have done no harm. But I remember now
I am in this earthly world; where to do harm
Is often laudable, to do good sometime
Accounted dangerous folly: why then, alas,
Do I put up that womanly defence,
To say I have done no harm?

And when we have a show about a female power behind the throne and a production where women play all the roles of powerful men, during a presidential race which holds out the prospect of the most influential First Lady of recent times becoming our first female president, why is there so little resonance?

The highlight of the evening was chatting with a local theater reviewer sitting next to us about this production and many others. (He was experiencing the added dramatic tension of wondering whether his car was being towed, because the legal parking spaces around BU were mostly taken up by people going to Game 6 of the ALCS at Fenway Park.) It was exciting to talk to someone who sees far more theater than we do, and to compare notes about his recent experience seeing Patrick Stewart in Macbeth and ours seeing Patrick Stewart in The Tempest and Antony and Cleopatra, to fondly recollect the period a decade ago when the American Repertory Theatre was interesting, and to discuss the RSC’s temporary Courtyard Theatre in Stratford. We may have convinced him to see the Henry VI trilogy in Stratford in February, in which case we will have done him a great service. If this production of Macbeth evolves for the better during the run, we should probably go back to seeing ASP productions late in their run as we have done in the past. However, having an opportunity to talk to this reviewer is a powerful incentive to go to opening nights. It’s an interesting question for us, and not one that I usually take away from an evening at the theater.