Macbeth (review)

In performance, Macbeth is often portrayed as a man torn between two selves, one self a dreamer and one a killer, who is destroyed through the ambitions and apparitions raised by his own imagination. Producer Kermit Christman and director Kevin Crawford's Macbeth built on this performance tradition by presenting a Macbeth who was not so much torn between two selves as he was a man who grew into his worst half. While Crawford's Macbeth was certainly ruined by the end of the play, he died more a soldier of his imagination than a man ruined by his encounters with the idiotic, witchy face of existential madness. Macbeth's "mind diseased" was, in Crawford's performance, the mind that shaped the play in a strangely coherent way. The audience was confronted with a process of becoming a version of the self that is first denied and finally accepted; it was forced to consider the consequences of growing into an imaginary world whose events were echoed by the world of the play and where the characters closest to Macbeth were extensions of his imagination. The world within and the world without shaped and were shaped by Macbeth in a way that made them inextricable. These worlds were framed by the set and costumes of the play to create a tight, unified, quasi-Gothic picture that reconciled the fair and the foul, the unwilling serial murderer with the isolated yet controlling warrior who died as he had lived.

Macbeth's self image as the old military general dominated Crawford's interpretation of the role. This was a Macbeth who waited with tense shakiness for the discovery of Duncan's murder and who acknowledged with a sense of relief what for him was the constant factor of battle: "At least we'll die with harness on our back." Crawford's performance emphasized two selves that merge into one. He lingered on the states of being in which his Macbeth found himself; Crawford emphasized Macbeth's existence in two worlds (his interior world and life and his exterior realm and roles) that merge into one in the course of the play.

The play began with the weird sisters' emergence onto Daniel Gordon's desolate set, marked by three ravaged rail-fences, or a wall with gaps in it, suggesting a deserted barn. The varying scenes were represented by lights that cast this stark, malevolent set-piece in the foreground or in the background as the action of the play required, but it was always there; the set always reminded the viewer of the single distracted globe in which the witches' disastrous designs and Macbeth's decisions were allowed to come to life: the mind of Macbeth himself.

The harsh, desolate set was complemented by the Gothic overtones of Penny Williams's costuming of Lady Macbeth and the weird sisters. While Macbeth, Duncan, and other men wore World War II-era uniforms (and some men, like Macduff, modern camouflage), Lady Macbeth and the weird sisters wore corsets and balloon skirts that suggested, without a whiff of kitsch, modern Gothic: an externalization of the dark undertones of the mind. The consistency with which every aspect of this production worked to emphasize this motif was remarkably effective.

Greta von Unruh, Krys Parker, and Trinna Pye as the Weird Sisters, with Kevin Crawford as Macbeth in the Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival's 2010 production of Macbeth, directed by Kevin Crawford.

Photo courtesy of Chuck Andersen.

The direction of the production presented viewers with a tormented psyche in medias...