Theater Talk: Macbeth, Something Wicked This Way Comes

“Warning:  You are about to enter the Barrymore Theater.  The producers ask that you please refrain from speaking the name of the play you are about to see while inside these walls.”

Signs requesting theatergoers to comply with this ancient tradition of not saying MACBETH aloud in the theater for fear of something bad happening were posted on every single glass door to the Ethel Barrymore theater, which hosted Alan Cumming’s solo performance of the Shakespeare play for a limited run that ended in July.

Productions of Shakespeare plays are common across New York, and many theater companies cover a few of them each season. Although Shakespeare cannot be said to ever get truly ‘old,’ it had become increasingly popular to put different sounds on the classic plays, whether by setting them in a different era and place, such as Shakespeare in the Park’s Comedy of Errors, or in the case of this production of Macbeth, reimagining them entirely by changing the circumstances under which they are performed.

Alan Cumming’s Macbeth takes place in the psychiatric ward of a hospital, the story relived by a madman in solitary confinement. Cumming recites the lines for all the roles, going through the entire play in under two hours, with brief pauses when the doctor or hospital orderly walk into the ward to check on him or help him into bed after his breakdowns.

This re-imagining of the story of Macbeth in a psychiatric ward reinforces and adds an extra layer of insanity to the characters and their actions, and particularly that of Macbeth himself, whose spiral into madness is made more obvious by Cumming’s delivery.

The bare set, consisting of hospital beds, depressing green walls, a bathtub, chairs, a table, stairs leading out of the room, and a window overhead from which he is occasionally observed, effectively conveys the harshness with which Cumming presents the rest of the play.

In a play where it is easy to get lost between characters and be confused as to Cumming’s identity at any given moment, it is necessary to be familiar with Shakespeare’s play in order to follow the line of action.  However, many clever strategies were also employed to distinguish between the characters.

The use of three overhead TV screens denotes when Cumming is channeling the Weird Sisters.  The screens remain blank during most of the show but eerily flicker to life at moments, showing a lot of static noise before the black and white video appears, reflecting Cumming’s actions onstage.

In a scene where Macbeth is conferring with Lady Macbeth and Cummings has to play both sides of one conversation, he uses a towel to distinguish between the two characters — draping it across his body to cover his chest when he is Lady Macbeth and letting it drop to cover only his crotch as Macbeth. The scene only became mildly uncomfortable when he essentially began seducing himself, removing his shirt and seductively teasing an invisible space where a man would have been before swiftly switching to occupy the space himself. Transcending gender, appearance, and sound, Cumming channeled the madness of each character.

The appearance of blood on what was essentially a psychiatric patient was particularly worrying as well. Cumming’s blood-soaked hands after the murder of Duncan made sense within the Macbeth narrative but also created an alarm within the hospital in concern for the patient. In the “out damn spot” scene, Cummings begins spontaneously bleeding all over, his torso covered in streams of blood.

Towards the end of the play, the two narratives began to merge, with hospital staff doubling as messengers coming to warn Macbeth against the approaching enemy. This merging of the patient’s two ‘realities’ steadily progresses until the end of the play, when the narrative of Macbeth finishes and the patient repeats his first line of the play. Thunderous applause marks the end of the show then.

The fusion of these two levels of reality ensures that one informs the other, transforming each and adding another nuanced level to the story. This reimagining of Macbeth provided thought-provoking, intense experience.

But above all, the show displays Cumming’s versatility and marks him as quite the powerful actor, filling the stage with intensity for the entire hour and 45 minutes that he is on it. Despite not having the same elaborate set and effects that other Broadway shows boast, Macbeth left its mark on audiences during its limited but successful run.