Playwright: William Shakespeare. At: The Court Theatre, 5507 S. Ellis. Phone: 773-753-4472; $38-$56 ( discounts for students and seniors ) . Runs through: Dec. 7. Photo by Michael Brosilow
You can keep your contemporary horror flicks—soulless torture porn that goes for cheap shocks rather than profound scares. For blood, gore and the kind of delicious horror that creeps under your skin and lingers for a lifetime, you have to look back half a millennium. That's when Shakespeare penned Macbeth, a tragedy whose very name most theater folk avoid saying aloud backstage.
You have to go back another 500 or more years to reach the Scottish play's setting in the pagan wilds of 10th-century Scotland. Like the age that spawned it, Macbeth is shrouded with sorcery, witchcraft and superstition. And something far worse: Evil. Of course, Shakespeare wrote other plays about evil: Othello has Iago; Titus Andronicus has Aaron the Moore. But Macbeth is singular in its depiction of evil that no mortal can hope to match Specters and hallucinations, scorpions in the brain, daggers floating in mid-air, hands eternally dripping blood: This is a world wholly unlike any other Shakespeare created. The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream give us white magic and fairy folk. Macbeth gives us the supernatural as a force of malevolence no mortal can match. Radio Macbeth understands all that.
With Radio Macbeth, director Anne Bogart's SITI ( originally Saratoga International Theatre Institute ) Company moves Macbeth to a 1940s radio broadcast. Here, co-director Bogart and sound designer Darron L. West pare the text to a 90-minute journey into realms where foolish mortals should fear to treead become the playthings of monstrous gods. A spoon, a coffee cup, a stick of wood, an old piano, a flashlight: Ordinary objects become the instruments of demons.
The stark minimalism of SITI's storytelling makes the narrative all the more vivid. A single actor personifies an entire parade of ghosts, an anonymous man, face obscured by a newsboy cap, becomes a host of slaughtered men, women and children. It's as unnerving as a thousand corpses floating past on a river of blood.
Bogart directs according to a combination of Viewpoints and Suzuki techniques, both of which are grounded in physicality, the actor's movement in time and space. With Radio Macbeth, sound is as important as movement. Clocks chiming, Zippos clicking into flame, pages riffling, chairs scraping the floor and the sheer power of Shakespeare's text delivered with deceptively straightforward simplicity—these audio elements coagulate into a ferocious whole.
With the exception of a massive, black-spattered shower curtain that looks borrowed from Psycho, the set is limited to a few mismatched chairs and a table or two. Something wicked this way comes? Maybe or maybe not.—but there's no denying the creepy thrills of Radio Macbeth.