Mobile Shakespeare Unit's Macbeth

Last night, I saw the first performance of Macbeth performed by The Public Theater's Mobile Shakespeare Unit. Though the production might still need to iron out a few kinks as it tours the city, bringing Shakespeare to audiences throughout the boroughs, this is definitely a version you want to see.

Why? Primarily Rob Campbell. He plays the noble thane like I've never seen it before, which is not necessarily a compliment, but in this case, a unique take on the character pays off, ultimately giving the audience greater insight into one of drama's greatest tragic villains. In his first appearances, Campbell already looks haggard, and not just because he's recently fought a battle. There is a world-weariness about him that only increases as the play gets bloodier and bloodier.

Like many of the actors in this production, Campbell is an old hand at the Public. Last summer, he appeared in King Lear in Central Park, and he has also been in the Public's productions of As You Like It, Measure for Measure, and Titus Andronicus. Even though his face might be familiar, though, there is a strangeness to his performance as Macbeth, an other-worldliness that I found quite unexpected.

In order to indicate that a character is speaking directly to the audience and not to the other people on stage, this production rings a small bell to mark the beginning and ending of a soliloquy. However, these private moments do not always occur where we think they will. For instance, when Macbeth re-enters a crowded room after everyone has just discovered the murder of Duncan, he says:

Had I but died an hour before this chance,
I had lived a blessed time; for from this instant
There's nothing serious in mortality...

Usually, this is played to the other people in the room. Macbeth is acting for them, showing a false grief for the murder of the king, even though he himself is the murderer. In this production, however, the speech is set apart by the bells and delivered directly to the audience. Macbeth is wishing not that he had never seen the sight of a murdered king, but that he had died before he had committed the murder. Now that he has such a heavy sin upon his conscience, he will never know blessedness again.

Campbell is best when he has these private moments with the audience. His Macbeth is uncomfortable with other people, even with his own wife. Only when he is alone do we glimpse his true nature. Perhaps the most moving part of the play was when, after hearing his wife cry out, Macbeth honestly remarks to himself:

I have almost forgot the taste of fears.
The time has been, my senses would have cooled
To hear a night-shriek, and my fell of hair
Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir
As life were in't. I have supped full of horrors.
Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts,
Cannot once start me.

This is a Macbeth trapped by his own evil, a man to be pitied as well as feared.

Edward Torres, who famously directed the premieres of The Happiest Song Plays Last and The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, helmed this production, assembling quite a cast of supporting actors. Jennifer Ikeda, another regular with the Public, plays Lady Macbeth, a role which frequently outshines the title character. Much like the case of last summer's Macbeth at the Armory, though, this Lady Macbeth remains in the shadow of her husband.

Once again, however, I found myself impressed by the role of Lady Macduff, this time played by Nicole Lewis. Though the part is rather brief, Lewis makes the most of it, conveying a sense of anxiety, and then terror, as death closes in around her own home. As her husband, Daniel Pearce is moving in his grief and terrifyingly righteous in his revenge.

The play's sparse set, designed by Wilson Chin, consists of three trunks on a square carpet. The cast moves the trunks around skillfully, and one of them is memorably used by Nick Mills as the hysterically funny Porter. Composer Michael Thurber, who provided music for the Mobile Shakespeare Unit's lovely production of Pericles last year, provides a haunting soundscape that sets the mood for a very different play than last year's.

If you're interested in seeing this production (and you should be), check out the Public Theater's website:

The Public Theater's Mobile Shakespeare Unit

To sing a song that old was sung...

Last night, when the non-indictment came out in Ferguson, and subsequently all hell broke loose, I was at the The Public Theater watching their production of Pericles, Prince of Tyre by William Shakespeare. The world seems like it's falling to pieces these days, but this is a play about hope. It is precisely the type of theater we need in these dark times.

When I was in college, I was in a production of Pericles, playing a multitude of small roles. I still remember my lines, and I'm pretty sure that this present production, directed by Rob Melrose, cut every single one of them. No matter. This stripped-down version uses only eight actors and is condensed to be performed without an intermission. It worked, even without my beloved Escanes, Philemon, and Second Gentleman of Mytilene.

Shakespeare begins the play with the poet John Gower, a contemporary of Chaucer, setting the scene for what was even then an old-fashioned tale. The opening lines are beautiful:

To sing a song that old was sung,
From ashes ancient Gower is come,
Assuming man's infirmities,
To glad your ear and please your eyes.
It hath been sung at festivals,
On Ember Eves and holy ales;
And lords and ladies in their lives
Have read it for restoratives.

The "holy ales" here refers to "holy days" on which ale might be drunk, and both my college version and this production at the Public substituted the term "holy days" as it makes much more sense to the modern ear. The Public's production also had the actors sing these lines, using haunting music composed by Michael Thurber.

Though Gower appears periodically throughout the text to provide narration and commentary, Melrose divided Gower's lines amongst the eight company members, which worked just fine. Most scholars consider Pericles to be a collaboration of Shakespeare's, either an older play he reworked, or something he wrote together with a contemporary playwright. (The critic Charles Nicholl argues that George Wilkins wrote much of the piece.) Consequently, few people mind when a director takes liberties with the text.

One scene nearly everyone agrees Shakespeare wrote, though, is the fishermen scene at the beginning of the second act. There's plenty of social commentary in the lines, and none of this is lost on the Public's production. The first fisherman, when posed with the riddle of how fish live in the sea, responds: "Why, as men do a-land: the great ones eat up the little ones."

Especially sharp was a barb in the fourth act, when the virtuous Marina (played by Flor De Liz Perez) tells a servant in a whorehouse that he should find some other occupation. "What would you have me do?" he responds. "Go to the wars, would you? where a man may serve seven years for the loss of a leg, and have not money enough in the end to buy him a wooden one?"

Fortunately, she does convince him to let her go, and Gower remarks:

Marina thus the brothel 'scapes and chances
Into an honest house, our story says.

I've always detected a faint whiff of irony in that last "our story says" as if Shakespeare were acutely aware of the improbability of the plot. However, in a tale as magical as this one, it is surely cynical to think so, and this is a play that conquers cynicism. It even sends the audience off with a benediction:

New joy wait on you! Here our play has ending.