500 Clown Macbeth (review)

Things that you need to know about 500 Clown Macbeth: first, there are no clowns. At least, not in the sense of full-facial greasepaint, oversized red shoes, and twirling bow ties. Second, the cast consists of three people-Molly Brennan, Adrian Danzig, and Paul Kalina-not 500. Third, the savvy theatregoer will recognize very little of Shakespeare's language from the Scottish play, though the casts' kilts pay homage to its original setting. The threesome is also significant, since the piece opens with the trio sharing among them, one word at a time, the dozen lines of the play's opening scene, beginning: "When shall we three meet again?"(1.1.1), concluding with a gleeful marching cadence as they repeat over and over again in unison, "Fair is foul and foul is fair" (1.1.10).

Theatrical convention-Shakespearean or otherwise-goes out the window from the opening moments of the performance. As electronica by The Propellerheads plays, the audience assembles in front of a stage set only with a three-tiered scaffolding of metal and plywood.

Brennan, Danzig, and Kalina enter from the rear of the performance space. At the Steppenwolf in summer 2007, they emerged from the light and sound booth to climb in, like rambunctious monkeys, over the audience, through the light rigging, eventually hopping down from the catwalks into the aisles. As they made their way to the stage, they clambered

Adrian Danzig as Bruce, Paul Kalina as Shank, and Molly Brennan as Kevin in 500 Clown's production of Macbeth. Photo by Michael Brosilow.

over the seated audience members, Kalina at one point straddling a befuddled theatregoer with a foot on each of her armrests as he adjusted his disheveled kilt.

Though they may not look like circus clowns, Brennan, Danzig, and Kalina are highly trained in clown, circus arts, and physical theatre, and display these skills with panache over the course of the performance. The two nods to conventional clown aesthetics in the show are the punked-out hairstyles and hair-colors of the cast, and their ears, which are painted solid red. In a post-show discussion after a performance at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center of the University of Maryland in College Park in December 2006, Danzig explained that the red ears "emphasize that the troupe is ever alert, listening for cues from the audience." Their names are apparently unrelated to 500 Clown Macbeth itself, but to the process of developing their performance personas, since the character-names have proven portable into their other ventures, 500 Clown Frankenstein and 500 Clown A Christmas Carol. The actors both are and are not portraying the central characters from these familiar narratives, and their clown names seem to allow them to detach the roles they play from themselves, and to avoid identifying with any specific character in the original piece of literature.

500 Clown Macbeth has been staged repeatedly since it premiered at Charybdis Multi-Arts Complex in Chicago in 2000. The now defunct Charybdis, which billed itself as an "artists' playground," was the perfect place to debut the cursed Scottish play with three clowns taking all of the major roles, performing on a rickety tri-tiered scaffolding-a playing space masterminded to fall apart by designer Dan Reilly. According to its Mission Statement, 500 Clown aims to deploy "circus arts, improvisation, and action-based performance to produce theatre that catapults the performers into extreme physical and emotional risk. The work shifts the audience from passive to active observers and creates a charged environment that celebrates the unpredictable power of the moment." The physical risks to the performers are clear; during one early performance, the scaffolding completely collapsed mere minutes into the show. It took several moments for the technicians running the lights and sound to realize that this particular accident had happened accidentally...