Updated ‘Macbeth’ set in encampment
If you want to move Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” from medieval Scotland to a contemporary homeless encampment and reenvision its protagonist as a castoff veteran, you could muster plenty of textual evidence to support your concept.
In the original, Macbeth is a ruthless general; as the play begins, he’s just “unseam’d” an enemy “from the nave to the chaps.” But after he murders his way to the throne, his deed haunts him. He sees threats and enemies where others don’t, not unlike a twisted version of posttraumatic stress disorder. His place in the world never feels secure. He can’t sleep, even as night never seems to give way to day.
But in taking that approach with the tragedy, AfricanAmerican Shakespeare Company’s production, which opened Saturday, July 13, at Taube Atrium Theater in San Francisco, more undermines the story than supports it.
A brief prologue, partly wordless, partly using the poem “I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies,” by June Jordan, opens the show in a panicked tone. Ensemble members dash in and out, brandishing cardboard signs, nursing injuries, each on the brink of sobs or screams. This is the constant state of emergency in which we live, the show telegraphs.
But once the play begins in earnest, it almost never again comments on or works with — or even seems aware of — its setting. It’s incongruous to hear talk of kings and castles and heirs and hosting guests for great parties amid a mess of tents, crates, pallets, hubcaps and trash
bags, all under the projected image of a highway overpass (Samira Mariama did the set design). That’s not to say the discrepancy couldn’t illuminate the play, but the cast members, under the direction of L. Peter Callender, neither make irony of the mismatch nor respond to it by doubling down on their sincerity. It’s as if they’re blind to it, as if the show might as well be set in a spaceship or the Wild West.
Callender’s direction fails to define the play’s world in still other ways. You might find yourself wondering why characters react to one noise now, but not one that was just as loud a second ago. You might not be able to tell whether the party that was happening in a previous scene is still going on or if much more time has passed. Ensemble members adopt muddy accents for one character but then drop them for another. (Are only some characters foreign?) Jeff Mockus’ grab bag of a sound design jars, using the cheesy discordant strings that a B movie might bray to tell you something bad is about to happen, then veering to the opening notes of Rufus and Chaka Khan’s “Tell Me Something Good.”
The show uses a script by Migdalia Cruz that reworks Shakespeare’s text as a modernverse translation. It was commissioned by Oregon Shakespeare Festival as part of its Play on! project, where playwrights were tasked with maintaining Shakespeare’s meter and meaning line by line, not changing a word or a whole speech if it’s still understandable to a contemporary audience, but, for example, finding analogs for more archaic allusions. The result here, however, feels like Shakespearelite. Many of the most famous lines are still there: “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,” “Out, damned spot,” “Fair is foul,” “Unsex me here.” The changes are more on the order of “How is’t with me?” becoming “What’s wrong with me?” It’s not clear how much such updates add to the show.
In other productions, actor Adrian Roberts almost always shines for his disarming lack of showiness, his ability to strip text to its essentials. But as the title role here, Robert delivers too many of his lines with the same flinty stare, like he’s stuck in a showdown that never ends and never changes. In a late scene, his Macbeth must go from believing a prophesy assures his inviolability as king to realizing how it very specifically foretells his doom. But from Roberts’ unvarying manner, you almost wouldn’t know Macbeth’s status has changed.
Sometimes cast members forge moments of clarity, especially Sumi Narendran, who in a variety of ensemble roles makes her lines urgent through thoughtful inflection and grounded diction. But even the most experienced performers often fail to transcend the direction, a series of randomseeming choices, each moment its own island in want of a bridge.