More air!

Macbeth goes outdoors at the Publick

by Jeffrey Gantz

MACBETH, By William Shakespeare. Directed by Diego Arciniegas. Set by Ted Arabian. Costumes by Toni Bratton Elliot. Lighting by Craig Brennan. With Scott Kealey, Susanne Nitter, Ted Jackson, Nathaniel McIntyre, James Butterfield, William Church, Nathan Blew, Matthew Bretschneider, Gio Gaynor, Nancy Carroll, Stacy Fischer, and Birgit Huppuch. At the Publick Theatre through July 16.

Good things, they say, come in threes. Of course, so do the Weird Sisters of Shakespeare's Scottish play. Already this summer New England has seen two productions of Macbeth, the Kelsey Grammer vehicle that opened at the Colonial in May before going on to Broadway (where it soon closed) and the Royal Shakespeare staging starring Antony Sher that was in New Haven last month. Now the outdoor Publick Theatre is hoping that we're not yet Macbeth-ed out. Will the third time be charmed? Or will we simply get the third sister?

I didn't see Sher in New Haven, but I caught Grammer here in town, in an intermissionless, two-hour production that was as airless as it was intense. And after hearing from Kenneth Branagh during his visit here last month that he cut some 70 percent of the Bard's text from his film versions of Much Ado About Nothing and Love's Labour's Lost, I began to wonder whether we haven't been misled by Romeo and Juliet's reference to "the two hours' traffic of our stage" -- whether Elizabethan playwrights didn't, like writers everywhere, write long, and whether what actually played on the stages of Shakespeare's time weren't somewhat abridged versions. (The equivalent these days would be the two-hour movie that plays at your local cineplex versus the three-hour "director's cut" that subsequently appears on video.) What Frasier, or any good sit-com, enjoys is room for the actors to express themselves. Would Grammer have been better served by a special one-hour Frasier episode in which, after rehashing his college thespian days with Niles, our favorite shrink dreams that he's playing Macbeth, with Martin as Duncan, Niles as Banquo, Eddie as Fleance, Bulldog as Macduff, and (take your choice) Daphne or Roz as Lady Macbeth? Just a thought.

At the Publick, Macbeth -- which in the version we have is short-shrift Shakespeare, under 2200 lines -- runs a reasonable two and a half hours (including a 15-minute intermission) but could certainly use more air. In keeping with the Publick tradition of unpretentious and thoughtfully detailed sets, Ted Arabian gives us a sort of Norman keep, all blocks of gray stone with some wooden infrastructure that includes what looks like the Leaning Tower of Dunsinane but turns out to be an imaginative high-backed throne whose quirky slant breaks up the predominating horizontals and verticals. Most of the military action, as well as the initial appearance by the Weird Sisters, takes place on the greenside that flanks the stage (where mourning doves and red-winged blackbirds provide vocal counterpoint). And director Diego Arciniegas adds some imaginative touches. He has the same actress play Lady Macbeth and Lady Macduff; what's more, this Lady Macbeth is with child. As for Lord Ross, he's seen making a pass at Lady Macduff after her husband has fled, and when he's rebuffed, he betrays her, helping with the slaughter of Macduff's people and acting as a double agent; at the end he's seized and bound on Malcolm's order. I didn't detect much cutting of the text beyond the suspect (it may well have been added by Thomas Middleton) III.v, part of which gets rolled into the Sisters' reappearance at IV.i.

Like most of Shakespeare's tragedies, however, Macbeth is screwed to its title character, and Scott Kealey didn't provide the sticking point I was looking for. His line readings sound artificial, as if he were declaiming them, and the characterization is rushed and one-dimensional. There's some improvement in the course of the evening and even a fresh (!) reading of "Tomorrow and tomorrow." But he's overshadowed by Susanne Nitter, who brings an aggressive articulation and exquisite detail to Lady Macbeth. She's consumed by a love of power but also by a love for her husband (the way she interrupts "O never/Shall sun that morrow see" to kiss him); later, when he sets out to destroy Banquo and Fleance, she can hardly bear his caress, and when he sees Banquo's ghost, she's reduced to tears -- she understands, as her husband does not, where the "simple" murder of Duncan has led. As Lady Macduff, Nitter swaps her short blond coif for long brown hair but doesn't otherwise seem much different -- or is that the idea?

Nathaniel McIntyre's Malcolm has weight, dignity and conviction; Ted Jackson's hulking, sulking Macduff grew on me, and so did the Sisters of Nancy Carroll (a loose-jointed but not over-the-top Porter as well), Stacy Fischer, and Birgit Huppuch, all attitude at first but chillingly heterophonous in their "Double, double." Elsewhere the acting was often as gray as the set. But a little care can go a long way in Shakespeare. For the line in II.ii where Lady Macbeth hears "the owl that shrieked," Arciniegas has an owl hoot twice -- bad luck according to Scottish superstition, but here testimony that, in Macbeth, you don't need the sound and fury of a big production to signify.