Scent of blood gets up nose in this ‘Macbeth’
The blood in Ubuntu Theater Project’s “Macbeth” splashes and stains. It dribbles and pools. It coats and cakes and crusts, making a mucky mutant out of all it touches.
Perhaps most unusually of all, it smells.
Not like real blood, and not even unpleasantly. It’s the earthy, milky smell of clay, and the brickred liquid releases a fresh cloud of the aroma each time Macbeth (Emilie Whelan) sloshes around in the rectangular pool of it laid at a jaunty angle in Ubuntu’s intimate playing space, a converted garage off the Flax store in
downtown Oakland. (Karla Hargrave designed the set.)
The olfactory register makes Shakespeare’s tragedy newly messy, newly visceral. Each move in this production, which opened Sunday, Feb. 9, tickles your nose hairs. Even if you’ve seen medieval Scotland’s ambitious general kill his way to the throne many times before, the deaths are more real when the protagonist gets bloodier and bloodier over the course of the show, so that she starts to look like the Toxic Avenger, and you can smell her kills on her.
And piquant blood is just one part of the revelatory vision of director Michael Socrates Moran. He casts only three actors — Whelan, Lauren Spencer and Mia Tagano — in all the show’s roles, and he cuts the play to a swift hour and 40 minutes without intermission. Chimes, shifts in lighting and projected stage directions work in concert to clarify, mostly seamlessly, who’s playing which role when.
Here the three witches who foretell Macbeth’s rise and fall hold the whole world of the play in their conjurers’ hands. They are the show’s storytellers, willing it into existence on a sadistic whim, or maybe to grieve something only they can understand.
They begin “Macbeth” cradling infants and humming a mournful melody, which crescendos into a threepart ululation. It becomes a refrain, part of the air in the theater, just as the witches are always wafting and watching in the background. Each time the song returns, it’s as if the show is reminding us, “And this latest kill in the body count? This dead person, too, is a mother’s child.”
Whelan, Tagano and Spencer refrain from affecting male bravado, which lets you hear Shakespeare’s words as if they’re not indelibly chiseled in stone but actively being searched for by these particular individuals. The three are thoughtful and understated, inward and careful, the way women often have to be. But nor do they perform femininity. They simply converse rather than proclaim.
Whelan excels in stretching out syllables to defy lines’ familiar rhythms, creaking open individual sounds to find untapped truths. When Macbeth and his trusted secondincommand, Banquo (Tagano), each learn, without fully saying so, that they’re no longer on the same side, it’s a rare moment of heartbreak in a play that usually stirs more fear than pity. It’s not merely that each must be wary of the other now. They’ve both lost a friendship, a small bit of trust in a world where there can’t be any. They know a death must come, and they’re mourning it in advance.
If occasionally the tension evaporates, Moran mostly makes “Macbeth” feel like one steady sinking of the stomach, one tightening knot of the innards. Choice after choice illuminates. The long coat of Duncan (Spencer) flares majestically from a throne, communicating status before Spencer even turns to face the audience. (Regina Evans did the costume design.) When Macbeth and Banquo first meet Spencer’s witch, she can halt their speech by cupping a jaw in her palm. When the witches chant the ingredients of their “Double, double toil and trouble” spell, they whisper and make their consonants pop, their words themselves the hisses and bubbles of their cauldron’s brew.
“Macbeth” reconfirms Ubuntu’s status as one of the most exciting young companies to emerge in the Bay Area in the past decade. They suggest just how many mysteries and possibilities still lie in Western theater’s foundational stories. They make the familiar strange, the known unknown, the classics the vanguard.