Beyond Frasier

Kelsey Grammer takes on Macbeth

by Carolyn Clay

MACBETH, By William Shakespeare. Directed by Terry Hands. Set and costume design by Timothy O'Brien. Lighting by Terry Hands. Sound by Tom Morse. Original music by Colin Towns. Fight direction by B.H. Barry. With Kelsey Grammer, Diane Venora, Michael Gross, Stephen Markle, Kate Forbes, Peter Gerety, Peter Michael Goetz, and Bruce A. Young. At the Colonial Theatre through June 4.

Not only does Macbeth murder sleep, along with a passel of folks, at the Colonial Theatre; he may also murder Frasier.

In any case, it's hard to imagine Kelsey Grammer being ball-and-chained to his popular TV character, the pompous shrink of Cheers and Frasier, after this respectable if unremarkable assault on the Bard. Grammer's thane is a tad monotonous, and the actor doesn't dig deep enough into Macbeth's guilt-spurred rampage toward "dusty death." But his diction and delivery are excellent, and he lays the text out straightforwardly, as if lobbying to let it be the star.

Let me say right up front, and then get over it, that the Broadway-bound production's failure to mention Shakespeare in the program credits (he does get a brief bio in the back of the book) is unconscionable. Are the producers afraid the S-word will put off Frasier fans? Is it that they're confused and think the curse associated with Macbeth is attached to uttering the author's name rather than the play's? Do they fear that Shakespeare would turn his Elizabethan-five-act nose up at this lean, mean, hour-and-50-minute Macbeth machine? Or do they just think everyone knows who wrote Macbeth? Whatever the reason, the omission does not sit well with me. But the production, directed and startlingly lit by the English director Terry Hands, is, though faster than furious, creditable. And there are performances by Diane Venora, as an almost insouciant and then touchingly defeated Lady Macbeth, and Trinity Rep and Homicide veteran Peter Gerety, as a delectably self-amused drunken porter, that exceed that standard.

You might call the simple, atmospheric staging bare-bones, though bare-beams would be more accurate. Hands's production moves in circles on a black round, its militaristically coated characters moving in and out of smoke and darkness. Defined, dramatic beams of light cut the air, often intersecting like crossed swords. The costumes, dominated by long, heavy army coats for the men, are black and white; when, at the play's climax, Birnam Wood appears to advance on Dunsinane, large green trees clang down on cables, and you realize theirs is the first color -- other than the red of stage blood -- that you've seen.

The dominant goal of the production is to move, and it does, without an intermission, as Macbeth, spurred by the promises of the Weird Sisters and the goading of his wife, moves from the murder of King Duncan to a rule dominated by irrationality and tyranny to a just fall. There is a difference, though, between a juggernaut and a hurry, and sometimes this Macbeth seems to be hurtling across the surface of the play, scanting the agonizing introspection against which the title character must ultimately gird himself to become a hardened villain.

In contrast to Grammer, whose rugged thane is brusque even in his fits and his despair, Venora, as Lady Macbeth, takes time with her character's disintegration. As in Michael Almereyda's Hamlet film, in which she plays Gertrude to Ethan Hawke's Hamlet, her readings are natural, almost contemporary. But unlike her aging but still kewpie-ish Gertrude, Venora's Lady Macbeth is strong and unadorned, if at first almost girlish -- and startled at her own resolve. She begins the banquet scene (in which no bloody apparitions appear, except in Macbeth's mind) still pluckish but is reduced by its end to a crumpled, keening wad in an oversized gilded chair. And her reading of the sleepwalking scene, in which she claws at her middle and emits a "sigh" that is a long, plaintive cry, is riveting.

Grammer presents a Macbeth with a wide, warlike stance that seems to grow wider, making him squatter, as the burden of his crimes weighs down on him. He delivers many soliloquies from the curved apron of the stage, directly to the audience. Not being a Frasier devotée, I was not hampered by associating the actor with his TV persona. But his performance struck me as well-spoken if not deeply felt, moving from swaggering manipulability (at one point Lady Macbeth leads him by the bloody hand) to scowling, grim resolve. And Grammer has a shining moment near the end in which he reacts with genuine surprise to the discovery that "I have almost forgot the taste of fears."

Among the supporting cast, Gerety brings a hoary panache to the porter, so delighting in his own arcane jokes that they seem almost funny. Most of the acting, however, is competent but unspectacular, with Michael (Family Ties) Gross a measured Ross and Bruce A. Young an underplayed if ultimately stricken Macduff. Few of the characters are as arresting as the lighting, which suggests a world both primitive and cut by lasers. There are oddities in the brute yet formal staging -- including the decision to have the witches, otherwise generically handled, participate in the felling of Macbeth (suggesting that he has been their puppet all along, rather than a man who chose the road to Hell). And some of the players, including Grammer, seem unsure what to do with their arms. In the main, though, this is a Macbeth that won't set Birnam Wood on fire yet is not without spark. The Bard may go unmentioned, but he also goes unbowed.