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MAC BETH
In Red Bull Theater’s MAC BETH, seven young women play schoolgirls acting out Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Their uniforms look Scottish; a pocket insignia can’t be read from the house, but the mind fills in a Scots name. The stockings and pleated skirts evoke kilts, and so, despite the tragedy, the cross-dressing women of comedies like As…
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Makbet
The Theatre Group Dzieci is a Grotowski-inspired art and service collective that has lived for a decade with Shakespeare’s Scottish play and is only now presenting it, as MAKBET, in a theatrical run. They charge you nothing to see it, but pay the hat (you should) and accept from them a “piece of paper” that…
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Macbeth
When Malcolm says of Macbeth’s grief after the discovery of the murdered Duncan, “To show an unfelt sorrow is an office/Which the false man does easy,” it is in contravention to the late king’s lament on the execution of the traitorous Cawdor that “There’s no art/ To find the mind’s construction in the face.” No…
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Sleep No More
I was one of those lining up on Memorial Day night to see Punchdrunk’s SLEEP NO MORE in the Chelsea gallery district. The Scottish play as nightmare is an old trope, well founded in the text. So to deconstruct it as a sort of haunted house theme park and fragment its episodes in the manner…