The Tragedy of Macbeth

By William Shakespeare, Directed by Doug Scholz-Carlson
Great River Shakespeare Festival, July 5, 2007

Perhaps the most heart-felt ovation on this Thursday night production of Macbeth came as the actors entered for the prologue and introduction of characters, a device that has become a tradition with the festival since its use in year one. Before a line is uttered, the audience spontaneously offers a heartfelt welcome back to Winona, and on Thursday, the welcome continued to build, briefly delaying the start of the production. Macbeth, along with the Great River Shakespeare Festival company, merits this applause for its luscious sets, lighting, and music and the incredible acting by the its talented cast.

Returning for their fourth season, Kim Martin-Cotton and Christopher Gerson play the leading roles as Lady Macbeth and Macbeth. Their first on-stage interaction is filled with a lustful physicality that fits a soldier’s return home after a long absence. Not only does this scene shake the audience out of an expectation of how Shakespearian monarchs (or soon to be monarchs) should act, it establishes the passionate connection between the two, adding a passionate subtext to the events that will follow.

Dressed in a floor-length, blood-red gown, Martin-Cotton’s rich voice evokes a lusty life force transferring her procreative potential to the task of giving birth to her royal aspirations. Her performance transforms her injunction to the spirits—“unsex me here, / And fill me from the crown to the toe topful / Of direst cruelty!”—from a cold negation of her nature to a re-focusing of her hot-blooded passion.

Gerson’s Macbeth is swayed by her passion, adding it to his own desire to believe that the predictions of the three Wyrd Sisters are his fate. While Lady Macbeth’s identity with blood eventually overwhelms her—“Yet who would have thought the old man / to have had so much blood in him?” she wonders of the king she had murdered after sliding into insanity—Macbeth is undone by what he feels is a betrayal by his fates. Yet this betrayal is overshadowed by his despair over the death of Lady Macbeth:

Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

Gerson’s agonizing and angry delivery of these lines, delivered before he learns of his full betrayal at the hands of fate, shows a realization that attaining the crown was a shared ambition, and the crown is empty without Lady Macbeth. Conventional wisdom says Macbeth is about cold ambition, yet Martin-Cotten, Gerson, and the rest of the company have succeeded in showing that this ambition is hot and complex.

Kern McFadden plays a memorable Banquo—both dead and alive, and Arthur Moss wears Duncan’s crown well, showing himself to be a lovable and clueless monarch. Jonathan Gillard Daly is wonderful as the porter but is oddly doubled as one of the murders while still playing the porter. Laura Coover’s channeling of the three apparitions as Wyrd Sister 3 is particularly memorable.

The Wyrd Sisters (Director Doug Carlson indicated that the Folio the company used for the play never calls them witches) stand as one of the highlights of this production with rich costuming, lighting, and song. The sisters’ presence on stage begins even in the prologue as they include the rest of the cast in a ritualized circle. They become a fixture in the backdrop during many pivotal scenes early in the play and maintain a presence on stage later in the play. This increased stage time, along with the heightened dramatics, promises a heightened significance. Yet, this promise is left unfulfilled. The prominence of the Wyrd Sisters might be an attempt to emphasize the role of fate or the supernatural in the events of the play. But both of these would undermine the rich context that Gerson and Martin-Cotten have created. Rather, I find the Wyrd Sisters’ prominence in the play ambiguous, as if the production has not made up its mind about who or what the Sisters are or why they are in the play.

I left Thursday’s production feeling that the play was somehow flat. I can only describe the elements of the play as top notch—the acting, lighting, music, staging—yet for me, something didn’t quite work. I wonder if my perceived “flatness” has to do with the disconnect with the Wyrd Sisters I tried to describe above, or if it relates to some of the choices over doubling characters (using one actor to play a second smaller role—used as a practical matter with a small cast, but sometimes used to suggest a relationship between the characters being portrayed by a single actor). I’m thinking particularly of the Porter’s double as a murderer and Lady Macbeth’s doubling as the messenger who warns Lady Macduff of her impending doom. In both of these doublings, the smaller characters maintain their original character, so Lady Macbeth actually delivers the warning, and the lame and wise porter becomes a brutal murder. I found that instead of adding interest or significance, these doublings tended to distract, and in the case of Lady Macbeth, distorted her character.

With minor complaints from this past Thursday’s show, this staging of Macbeth is a very strong presentation of this wonderfully horrid story. And if past year’s are an indication, the Great River Shakespeare Festival’s Macbeth will get better and better as the season progresses.

Macbeth plays in repertory with As You Like It through July 29
Visit the Great River Shakespeare Festival for schedules: Great River Shakespeare Festival