By William Shakespeare, adapted by Maxx Miller. At: Suitcase Shakespeare Company at the Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport Ave. Tickets: 773-935-6875, www.athanaeumtheatre.org; $20 ($10 students, $15 seniors/educators/industry). Runs through: Jan. 27
In Macbeth, as with much of Shakespeare, characters often bring bad tidings of violence as a substitute for the real thing, but not in Suitcase Shakespeare Company's abridged take on the Scottish Play.
For nearly five years now, Suitcase Shakespeare has built its reputation on going beyond the Bard's words, and in Macbeth, this added physicality allows for a more satisfying expression of the characters' intense paranoia, guilt and rage. Basically, there's a lot of stage fighting, and though timeless his work is, Shakespeare could always use more stage fighting.
Unfortunately, there's not much room for or attempts at visual embellishment in the first half of this adaptation, which feels like a 40-minute sprint to intermission. The actors rush their dialogue too often and it comes out wooden and frankly a bit amateur, but everyone comes into their own in the second act, or I should say Act II Scene IV and beyond.
From start to finish, however, the company's knack for the theatrical makes the three witches the production's greatest strength and really accentuates what makes Macbeth unique among Shakespeare's tragedies—the emphasis on the supernatural element. Wearing animal-inspired masks, the Weird Sisters speak in three distinct pitches to create an eerie and hypnotic sound that makes the infamous first scene of Act IV one of the real highlights.
Later, they don equally well-crafted masks and follow Macbeth (founding company member Matthew Davis) about the stage, reflecting his emotional toil visually and echoing it with vocal effects and flourishes. Their hand twitches and choreographed movements add so much to the play, but the rest of the cast is not required to treat us to the same energy. Although their supernatural nature understandably warrants a different performance technique than the rest of the cast, there's such a discrepancy in the level of creative quality that something could have been done artistically to bridge the gap.
Shakespeare usually only goes as far as its actors, but adding to the sensory experience takes a little bit of pressure off the performers. Nevertheless, the key players exercise a sufficient understanding of how to deliver Shakespeare, especially Davis, who demonstrates the important fact that less can be more and nails the all-important "she should have died hereafter" monologue.
As to Shakespeare's many themes present in Macbeth, the production doesn't necessarily shed a new light upon them so much as it streamlines the emotional intensity of the plot and the predicament of its characters to the audience. With the Weird Sisters present in background of the final scene, there's also greater sense of the stakes, but on the whole, the production doesn't offer any revelations in spite of the liberties afforded by condensing the material.
Yet Shakespeare's revered work begs for interpretation upon reinterpretation and Macbeth's visceral nature especially suits the artistic vision of Suitcase Shakespeare Co. More could have been done to give this staging the emotional punch it's definitely capable of, but there's no denying the creative thinking that went into crafting a quick and accessible version of one of Shakespeare's finest tragedies.
