The bare essentials

Tonight in honor of Ryan's birthday on the morrow, Robert bought us all tickets to the Washington Shakespeare Company's production of Macbeth. WSC is the "other" Shakespeare company in D.C., not to be confused with the renowned Shakespeare Theater Company that has the big theater venues in downtown D.C. WSC is a sort of small, experimental company with a playhouse in a seedy warehouse district in Arlington.

This production of Macbeth has garnered national attention for WSC because the director chose to costume the entire cast in the nude. The nudity supposedly isn't a publicity stunt, but the director's vision to pare the play down to the bare essentials and expose the primal nature of the characters.

My thought? Eh. I didn't think the nudity did much one way or the other. It certainly did save them a lot of money on costuming, though. All they did was put some green and brown makeup splotches on the actors.

This was all quite a new experience for me, though. This is the first time I've ever watched naked females move around in person. Sure, I've seen photographs and movies, but never before, live and in person, without the benefit of airbrushing and makeup. These women (except for the one Asian woman) were all very rubenesque, while all of the men (except for one older character) were really skinny.

The thing I found most difficult with this particular production was the cast size. There are about 27 different characters in the play. WSC's cast had only six men and four women, so everyone except Macbeth had multiple roles. It was confusing. Now, this is not the first time I've seen Macbeth (duh), but I still had problems keeping track of who was who and when. Compounding the problem was their decision to have some of the women in the cast play male characters. I think in this case, the nudity worked against them, since the audience couldn't identify characters by their costumes and when a woman was playing a man, it was very obvious they weren't male. Of course, the director didn't want the actors hiding behind their costumes, so I don't know what else they could have done.

The theater itself is a "black box" theater with about 100 steeply banked seats. The stage for this show is a flat, right triangle platform with the audience setting along the hypotenuse. Nine very tall, very thin primitive looking statues of men and women stood behind the stage in the corners, recalling both the statues on Easter Island and "trees." Down stage left they have a hole in the stage to contain a deep pool of water that also doubled as the witches' cauldron. They added a smoke "haze" around the stage which, of course, meant there was haze throughout the theater.

The three best actors were the three witches. Aside from the fact that they spoke so loudly their voices reverberated in the theater, they provided the dramatic focal point and commentary for the whole play. The actor playing Macbeth was a favorite of Ryan and Robert (I don't think either of them were paying attention to his acting), but I was unimpressed, finding his emotional range rather limited as about all he did was yell and scream all the time. Lady Macbeth/Hecate was interestingly "contemporary" in her delivery, which, at times, I found mildly disconcerting. All of the other actors performed serviceably, though with all, there were moments I was not able to understand their words, and sometimes the stage movements of the men were a bit stilted and looked like "acting." Plus, with all of the male actors other than Banquo, I never bought their characters as Scottish nobility and war lords (not that they were effeminate, but they just didn't have that kind of hypermasculinity).

Tonight was the closing night of the run, which has been going on for about a month, so, you can't go see this play now if you missed it. Their next big production this fall will be Caligula.

And thus was our evening. What did you do tonight?