Also this issue:

Strikes, Fights, Big City
A turbulent New York theater season produced some notable work.
-Toby Zinman

Lullaby of Broadway
This season’s musical theater scene has been a bit sleepy.
-David Anthony Fox

Alone Again, Naturally
-Susan Hagen

Artsbeat
-Debra Auspitz

Green Violin
-Steve Cohen

The Plotz Retrospective
-A.D. Amorosi

Bell Esteem
-Kristina Weise

Don DeLillo
-Andrew Ervin

April 24-30, 2003

theater

Macbeth

Mac daddy: Jack Koenig stars in a bloody good version of Macbeth at Philly Shakes.

by Toby Zinman

Shakespeare’s portrait of ambition gone mad and overrunning the world with violence is set, in this production, not in medieval Scotland but in WWI -- a choice that doesn’t seem to have any particular political point, but allows for some interesting effects.

The opening scene, when Macbeth hears the prophecy that he will become "king hereafter," is moved from the stock-spooky "heath" to a spectacular battlefront. Soldiers in gas masks, with rifles, obscured by "fog and filthy air" are tended by three nurses who smother a wounded soldier with a bloody pillow: The weird sisters have never looked so convincingly terrifying. Director Gus Kaikkonen has made some shrewd decisions in this handsome production of

Macbeth

, including an evocative sound design (Fabian Obispo) and gorgeous costumes (Hiroshi Iwasaki and Miriam Jones). Especially effective is the mysterious column of fog in the scene "Is this a dagger which I see before me" (Jerold R. Forsyth designed the lighting).

Having heard his own deepest wishes seemingly spoken aloud by magic, Macbeth is launched on a career that is unstoppable: Wartime events conspire to eliminate the one man standing in his way and then to have Duncan, the kind and good king, decide to visit Macbeth’s castle. Lady Macbeth’s fierce ambition is inflamed by this news, and she convinces her husband to kill the king while he sleeps. There are many political twists and turns, but the driving forces of the plot are guilt and fear. Once they begin the violence, there is no stopping it -- one after another, enemies and enemies’ wives and children have to be eliminated. And the madness grows.

The play offers two immense roles which require passion and grandeur. E. Ashley Izard turns in a fine performance as Lady Macbeth -- her mad scene is both an original reading and a human one -- although she is far better at conveying the "false face" that hides a "false heart" than she is in convincing us she is a ruthless woman; the early "unsex me" speech, crucial to her character and her breakdown later in the play, seems too tame.

Jack Koenig as Macbeth has the lean-and-mean looks that lend themselves to a portrait of self-aggrandizing tyranny, but since his voice has no range and his face no modulation, he remains merely an unconvincing speaker of the words, not a man of intense and savage desires and torments. His pedestrian delivery of the famous "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" soliloquy lends nothing to the wonderful lines or to the dramatic moment. Even more disappointing is that there is no visible relationship between Macbeth and his Lady: no intimacy, no sexuality, none of the coded understandings and exchanged glances of marriage. They are merely co-conspirators, and although Izard is always in character -- watching her husband, shaping his responses -- he never so much as notices her.

The large cast is uneven; John Lopes is a wooden Macduff, nearly unmoved by the news that his entire family has been murdered, while by contrast, Buck Schirner, in a minor role of a nobleman, conveys great complexity of response when he learns his son has been killed on the battlefield.

Overall, it’s an engrossing production if not a perfect one, and, as Carmen Khan, artistic director of Philly Shakes, points out in her program notes, Macduff’s lines seem painfully relevant these days:

" … each new morn/ New widows howl; new orphans cry; new sorrows/ Strike heaven on the face … "

(t_zinman@citypaper.net)

MACBETH Through May 18, Philadelphia Shakespeare Festival, 2111 Sansom St. 215-496-8001