This Cal Shakes ‘Macbeth’ is both bloody and bland
As William Shakespeare’s Macbeth reflects on how meaningless life has become for him amid his murderous rise to power, and even bloodier attempts to keep it, he famously says life “is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” The production of “Macbeth” that closes California Shakespeare Theater’s 45th season definitely has a lot of bombast. The production design is flashy in a literal sense. Russell H. Champa’s otherwise gloomy lighting is dominated by fluorescent lights that flicker brightly in front of the action during battles, obscuring the fruits of Dave Maier’s fight direction. Deafening bursts of electronic music punctuate scene changes in Elizabeth Rhodes’ sound design. Melissa Torchia’s costumes are vaguely medieval looking, in dark and muted tones, but Adam Rigg’s set is starkly modern, a large box with a metal frame and glasslike clear panes that get splashed or smeared with blood with every murder. With a couple of tree trunks jutting through it, the set looks more than anything like a zoo enclosure. The many metal poles in the fore of the structure also routinely obstruct visibility of the actors during key moments. All this would be fine if the action itself in the play were as electric as its trappings, but the staging by director Victor Malana Maog, who recently helmed Mfoniso Udofia’s “Her Portmanteau” for American Conservatory Theater and “In Old Age” at Magic Theatre, is oddly lackluster for what is usually a reliably intense tragedy. Part of that comes down to the conspicuously weak performance of nonlocal actor Rey Lucas in the lead role, playing Macbeth as a young dude mildly irked by the bummers that befall him. Macbeth’s murderous jealousy of his buddy Banquo here almost seems warranted because Jomar Tagatac’s wary Banquo has so much more personality and intensity than Macbeth himself, and may be better suited for his role. The usually reliable Liz Sklar, a Marin Theatre Company regular who played Desdemona in Cal Shakes’ “Othello” a few seasons back, brings a lot of passion to her scheming Lady Macbeth, but her line delivery is so speedy here that it compromises her comprehensibility. (The gowns that Torchia gives her are easily the production’s most eye-catching costumes, and the least suggestive of any particular period.) In fact the cast is full of generally strong actors who seem wasted here, including Anna Ishida, Rotimi Agbabiaka, Catherine Luedtke and Lyndsy Kail in various roles. Warren David Keith’s listlessly drunken Porter gets a few laughs, but his weary King Duncan makes little impression. Joseph Patrick O’Malley is a squirrely Malcolm, Duncan’s son and usurped heir, whose most important scene is trimmed down here in a dully streamlined way that sells both Malcolm and Dane Troy’s bland Macduff short. Maog adds a lot of touches that are intriguing in theory but muddled and confusing in practice, such as the banquet scene with no visible ghost, bird calls punctuating deaths and the effectively creepy Weird Sisters (played by most of the actors in rotation) ushering out the spirits of the dead. Cal Shakes is doing a lot of exciting work these days with both its modern classics (such as its amazing production of Brecht’s “The Good Person of Szechwan” this summer and the new works coming out of its New Classics Initiative (“black odyssey,” “Quixote Nuevo,” “House of Joy”). At the same time, the Shakespeare productions that still make up half the season have often been much shakier, feeling as if they’re being done dutifully at best and reluctantly at worst. Psyching himself up for the first big murder, Macbeth says, “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.” If Cal Shakes is going to do such a halfhearted production of one of Shakespeare’s most potent tragedies, it would be better if it didn’t do it at all.