A wild ride

SGFT's interactive Macbeth

by Bill Rodriguez

MACBETH. By William Shakespeare. Directed by Eric Tucker. With Nigel Gore, Jennifer Mudge Tucker, Jim O'Brien, Joshua Willis, and Rudy Sanda. At the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre through October 15.

Jennifer Mudge Tucker and Nigel Gore

Well, one reaction is assured for the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre production of Macbeth. It's one hell of a roller-coaster ride -- as literally as the laws of physics and theatrical production will allow.

For all the advantages of theater as a performance art, with its vitality and palpable immediacy, it lacks film's ability to telescope reality with close-ups. Oh, lighting can isolate a speaker so all else fades away, and some performances are so larger-than-life that the actor might as well be on a big screen. (Once in an aisle seat, I fell victim to a more-than-metaphorical in-your-face performance by Judith Malina as she and a howling Living Theater troupe attempted to break the fourth wall.)

In the wide-open garage-like space of the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre, this Macbeth employs an ingenious solution to the age-old problem of audience involvement. As directed by Eric Tucker (an actor on leave from Trinity with wife Jennifer Mudge Tucker), performers and audience share the same stage. When murder plans commence, the four sections of seating are rolled up to the actors. We are thrust forward as witnesses when Macbeth (Nigel Gore) waffles about killing the king and Lady Macbeth (Tucker) goads and browbeats him into it. Macbeth is literally trapped in his quandary as the audience squeezes them into a thin strip against the wall.

With similar effectiveness, the seating is reconfigured on the run to enclose the players on three sides when they feel surrounded. Again and again we are wheeled around, becoming active participants in the mayhem. At one point, the four sections converge until the "stage" is a tiny, claustrophobic box for a brief scene.

The rest of the staging is just as energetic and physically flamboyant. For example, when the family of Macduff are murdered, they are tossed like Mafia victims into the back of a black car that backs through a garage door that has been a primary, noisy, entrance point.

This is a Halloween take on the tragedy, starting before the play begins. Out in the lobby, we see that the witches are three girls, about 10 years old. The prelude of vegetal gore has them cut open a pumpkin and scoop out the innards with their hands. They lead audience members to their seats in the dim theater space, passing bodies dangling in grotesque shapes; the play opens after a battle on which the Macbeth fortunes turn. The young witches then speak through three twitching corpses reanimated for the purpose. Very clever.

Notwithstanding all the above due credit, as a whole this production didn't work for me. First of all, some of the ingeniously dynamic staging seemed like showmanship in search of purpose, such as when an anti-Macbeth confab takes place on their bed, surrounding the sleeping regicides. Are we to believe the couple are having a paranoid, prescient dream? (Soon after, however, the witches do the "Double, double, toil and trouble" scene on the bed around them, stirring their pumpkin "cauldron." This time the device works, since Macbeth had encountered the "weird sisters" earlier.)

Much more important than any staging, the tragedy is about the Macbeths, and succeeds or disappoints through them. This production taught me how difficult it is to lift Macbeth above the brutality of the Elizabethan revenge play conventions and up to the level of psychological drama that Shakespeare offers. For that we need to at least glimpse the two conspirators in their internal play within the play. I didn't detect that subterranean dimension in Tucker's Lady Macbeth. The ambitious villainess had her post-murder "out, damn spot" regrets, of course, but not any hint of vulnerability beneath the earlier bravado, for example. With Macbeth the task should be easier, since his self-doubts are on the surface, and Gore did give us much of what we need. But I knew that the usurping king wasn't convincing me in this production when the guilt-ridden banquet scene with the ghost of Banquo, usually a gripper, fell flat.

Joshua Willis's Banquo is a solid performance. For me, the strongest moment is when Jim O'Brien's Macduff hears that his family has been slaughtered -- understated but powerful, grief quickly rising to the surface and bursting like a bubble before he's composed again. On the other hand, the casting of Chris Byrnes as both the ill-fated King Duncan and the drunken porter is unfathomable. Hilarious in the comic relief scene, a real crowd-pleaser, how could the same actor be expected to also provide the stately gravitas so necessary for the murder to be profoundly tragic and not merely political?

But the SFGT Macbeth is certainly worth experiencing. Seldom is theater such a rush, good bits, flaws and all.