The Forest for the Trees

THEATER REVIEW: Wilma Theater's Macbeth

by Mark Cofta

	print	email	reply	rss feed

Published: Oct 13, 2010

Jim Roese Macbeth (with C.J. Wilson in the title role) runs nearly three hours.

I expected a lot from the Wilma Theater's first jab at Shakespeare in 31 years, artistic director Blanka Zizka's "daring new vision" of Macbeth . Certainly the words "daring," "new" and "vision" accurately describe much of the Wilma's work.

But not this time.

While effort to thoughtfully examine the text — much of this Macbeth is clear and well-spoken — is matched by a respect for the play as ghost story and psychological thriller, neither constitutes a consistent or unifying vision, and the play peters out rather than climaxes.

That verbal clarity comes at a price: This Macbeth runs nearly three hours, often sounding over-enunciated and delicately dispassionate. While this approach makes sense — no muddying Shakespeare's verse with emoting — C.J. Wilson's stentorian title character's early moral uncertainty about fulfilling the witches' predictions of his royal ascent by murdering his king just evaporates. Likewise, his Lady's naked ambition stalls in Jacqueline Antaramian's languid performance. Even Shakespeare's blatant comic relief — Ames Adamson's clownish drunken porter — feels indulgently tedious. What at first seems a cautious approach slides into blandness.

The physical production is intermittently impressive but ultimately frustrating. Consider the witches: At first, these "weird sisters" (Nako Adodoadji, Krista Apple and Rachael Joffred) seem like refugees, haunting reminders of modern war's civilian casualties. Zizka makes them supernatural, though, with wire tricks — which might be impressive if we didn't see the wires, couldn't hear the actors crawling into position for their first act finale fly-in, or hadn't seen Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon a decade ago. By the end, they're just battle-scene extras.

Mimi Lien's bleak parking-garage landscape, Oana Botez-Ban's stark modern costumes and Tyler Micoleau's sculpted lighting, brave shadows and hand-held illumination (flashlights, candles) promise much early on, but don't deliver beyond ghost-story thrills. The set ultimately seems flat and empty (except for one scene in an idyllic London park); the lighting becomes perfunctory; and the modern urban warfare implications dissolve into the ensemble rushing about in generic, impossibly crisp fatigues. Even the inevitable Wilma projections disappoint: After three hours of poetry and abstraction, do we really need a picture of trees to envision a forest?

Depth of Field
Body Mind and Hair
March of the Humannequins
Kaleidoscope
Where's the Beef?
True Fiction
The Word
Light Drift
Many Entendres
HOMIESAPIENS/Atypical
The Big Sea