The Tragedy of MacBeth.
by William Shakespeare
directed by Tony Tsendeas
July 6th-22nd, 2007
Thursday-Saturday at 7:30pm
Sundays at 5:00pm
Outdoors in the Meadow at the Evergreen Museum and Library
4545 North Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21218
Directions
Baltimore Shakespeare Festival presents its 7th summer production in the meadow at the Evergreen House, William Shakespeare's The Tragedy of MacBeth. Audiences are encouraged to bring chairs or a blanket and the meadow opens two hours prior to curtain for picnics.
Scotland: Macbeth and Banquo are home-bound war heroes. En route, they meet three witches, whose strange prophecies immediately begin to be fulfilled. The strangest of the prophecies dictates that Macbeth will become king. Obsessed by the witches' promise and encouraged by his ambitious wife, Macbeth goes about fulfilling the prophecy by killing the king and assuming the throne. His bloodletting gains momentum, the body count rises, and Macbeth speeds onward through the carnage as his fate gains critical mass.
Tony Tsendeas, an Artistic Associate for Baltimore Shakespeare Festival and former Artistic Director of Action Theater, is an actor, teacher, writer, and director. He is a theatre faculty member at the Baltimore School for the Arts. At Baltimore Shakespeare Festival, Tsendeas has directed Love For Words (By Kimberley Lynne), Othello, Julius Caesar, and most recently The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged.) For BSF's Teen Performance Program, he has directed Macbeth, As You Like It, and Hamlet. He has also directed plays Samuel Beckett and Edward Albee, as well as original material. As an actor, his roles include Claudius in Hamlet, Caliban in The Tempest, Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, and The Player in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and most recently Paroles in All's Well That Ends Well.
BroadwayWorld.com Review
BSF's "MacBeth": Creepy, Cool and Exhilarating
James Howard, Broadwayworld.com4 1/2 out of five
"Something wicked this way comes" says one of the witches in Shakespeare's The Tragedy of MacBeth (sic), which opened last weekend at the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival's outdoor theatre space at the Evergreen House. Boy, she wasn't kidding, either! This is one wicked show. Under Tony Tsendeas' tight, thrilling direction, this isn't your high school English teacher's version of a beloved classic. It is a thrilling, ultra-cool, sleek, sexy, and shocking production. This industrial/goth/extreme sports presentation admittedly won't be for everyone, but if you let yourself go with it, this Macbeth is a thrill ride and horror film all at once.
From top to bottom, this fierce production is firing on all cylinders. Tsendeas and his creative staff have created a highly stylized, fully compact realization of a vibrant concept. Set in what best may be described as an industrial wasteland, designed by Bob Marietta, the nasty, violent environment of Scotland is hinted at, (with cinderblocks, industrial strength plastic and metal/wooden beams) but never overwhelms the production. The same can be said about Norah Worthington's costumes, a beguiling mix metallic and leather-like fabrics, mixed with embellished extreme sports padding. You can tell the good guys from the bad, but like the play (and this concept) suggests, the costumes let us know that the line between the two is perilously thin at best. The one misstep is the porter's costume which includes a popular brand of tennis shoe that sticks out for its lack of generic style.
Otherwise, the costumes really point up the themes - they are sleek, violent, dark, brooding, and have a seriously sexual under current. (One of Lady Macbeth's costumes is somewhat revealing, and the musculature of the young male cast is almost overtly on display. Adrienne Gieszl's lighting design, most visible in act two when the sun has set, is equally stark and yet quite moody. The video design by Anthony Scimonelli adds a very creepy layer to the visual elements of the production, from a dripping blood to some chilling blinking eyes. Brian Daniloski's sound design is wonderful - every single word is clear as a bell and he used some awesome effects to enhance certain passages. His original music is enough to give you goose bumps, especially the fearsome breathing between scenes.
The eighteen member cast is uniformly excellent, finding the perfect mix of Shakespearean acting excess with modern sensibility. Even the smallest walk-on roles are expertly covered, with many players doing double or even more roles (one actor has the honor of playing five)! And each actor creates such distinct personae that it is often difficult to realize that there isn't actually a cast of thirty or more! Standouts in the smaller roles include all three of the witches - Diana Cherkas, Christine Demuth and Everyman regular Rosemary Knower - as well as the ever reliable (and versatile) Chris Graybill and Steve Polites, who offer intense performances as King Duncan and Ross, respectively.
The larger supporting roles are no less superb. Dana Whipkey's Banquo is a true tragic hero. You swell with his bravado in war and are saddened by his untimely and bloody end. However, it is as the silent Ghost of Banquo, interestingly enough, that Whipkey really delights - it is no wonder that he sends Macbeth to the brink of insanity. Robb Hunter as the other tragic hero of this tale, MacDuff is the anti-Macbeth in every way. He is a much younger Macduff than normally cast. Here, he is not a contemporary of Macbeth which adds an interesting layer to the split between the former friends, and makes the loss of his similarly youthful family all the more moving. A fearsome combination of machismo and male athleticism, Hunter also adds to the sexual under current that pervades many levels of this production. (Mr. Hunter also is listed as the fight director, and he has choreographed some visually stunning battle scenes, using a variety of rather nasty looking weapons of individual destruction, and some really nifty slow motion effects.)
Susan Rome's Lady Macbeth is a boiling cauldron of lusty sexuality - her kisses are passionate and animalistic, and she struts about the stage with a look of desire and savage greed. This interpretation may not sound all that new - a Lady Macbeth driven by the exhilaration of power and greed, tempered by the insanity of profound guilt - but trust me, Ms. Rome's take on the whole thing is fresh as newly minted money and literally hair-raising. Most beautifully, she manages to give the audience reason to feel just the tiniest bit sorry for her as she sleep walks looking for relief from the blood that never disappears from her hands. One can only imagine what she could do with Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd!
Finally, Conrad Feininger's Macbeth is a little unsettling at first. He seems reluctant to take on the prophecies of the witches, but settles in once the first prediction comes true. It is when he becomes almost savagely addicted that we see a man intoxicated by power, fiending for more. Power is his drug and it is a monkey on his back that he will never be rid of. His final confrontation with Macduff is heady stuff, indeed. It is a wonder to watch Feininger go from being sure that "man not born of woman" can't happen to the shock of realizing Macduff himself was "untimely ripped" from the womb, then melting in horror as he realizes, too late, that his end is near. It is a very quick moment, but Feininger lets us briefly see his regret before plunging into one final, bloody slash at his old friend, now enemy.
As I said, this Macbeth might not be for everyone, but it is rare to see such a finely executed, fully realized modern concept imposed on one of literature's greatest plays. Just when you think you've seen it all, along comes this exciting twist on an old classic.
The Tragedy of Macbeth': Daggers of the mind
Dan Collins, Baltimore Examiner, July 10, 2007BALTIMORE - The titular character in Shakespeare's "Macbeth" sees in his mind's eye a dagger.
Macbeth grasps the specter of the blade, and soon thereafter, a real dagger to murder his lord, King Duncan. But the "dagger of the mind," as Shakespeare wrote, is also Macbeth's conscience. And as the tragedy unfolds, it strikes at his sanity, as it strikes his queen, Lady Macbeth, his hand-washing-obsessed accomplice in regicide.
This duality of the daggers and the foul work they do, dispatching kings and kids alike, is at the heart of director Tony Tsendeas' "The Tragedy of Macbeth."
"Blood will have blood," says Macbeth (Conrad Feininger), and Tsendeas does not disappoint, as the gore literally flies across the stage as in the heinous slaughter of rival Macduff's (Robb Hunter) family. The scene is particularly disturbing as Tsendeas brakes the action - characters kill each other in "slow motion" under fierce red light and discordant music. A wounded mother (Molly Moores' Lady Macduff) crawls across the floor in screaming agony as a brigand stabs her baby to death, while another covers the scene with a hand-held video camera, a nod to modern times in more ways than one.
The scene shocked the audience into dead silence - a vast improvement from the unintentional laughter produced by an earlier scene where Macbeth confronts a ghost summoned from his own tortured conscience, the throat-cut Banquo (Dana Whipkey). It's a moment meant to evoke horror, but given today's audience, hip to camp zombie movies like "Shaun of the Dead," there were more chuckles than gasps.
Kudos to Norah Worthington's costume designs, which complement the techno-rock feel of the performance. Soldiers and noblemen wear a sort of combat chic, with kneepads, black boots and breastplates, like a SWAT team about to play paintball. While King Duncan (Chris Graybill) wears a straw-colored crown and raiment, like a benevolent "farmer king," Macbeth's steel-gray crown and black robes trimmed in red might have been borrowed from Sauron of "The Lord of the Rings."
The witches (Rosemary Knower, Diana Cherkas, Christine Demuth) are uniform in their look and language (imagine if "The Addams Family's" Morticia had been a punk rocker), and it is their words that bookend the play.
With Macbeth dead and the new king serenely picking bits of bloody hair from the mace his enemy once wielded, the witches muse on whom they shall greet next? "MACBETH!" they shout at the play's beginning. As the curtain falls, they ask again, only this time, there is silence. The answer remains a mystery ... but one can see the bloody cycle is set to run its brutal course again.
All 2007/2008 Seaon images designed by John Malloy