Out, damned spot!

Shakespeare's Macbeth, perhaps more than any other play, bears with it a sense of darkness, mysticism, and the occult.  Legend has it that the infamous "double double toil and trouble" was lifted from an actual book of spells, casting an eternal curse on the play.  The effects of this curse have been felt from the first performance, where it is said an actual death took place onstage, right up to my own high school appearance as a witch where a brazen stagehand fell headfirst into the cauldron after daring to speak the name of the play in the theater.  (Not normally the superstitious type, I have been a true believer ever since.)

A passionate lover of Shakespeare, I have seen more productions of Macbeth than I care to admit.  Worse, I've liked most of them, demonstrating how difficult it is for me to separate a bad production from a brilliant text.  I just like Shakespeare, and I'll be the first to admit it.  But it is rare for any production to show me anything new when it comes to The Scottish Play.  Sure, you may have put the witches on stilts this time, but it's still the same basic thing.  You can set it in the future or the past or make everyone wear fuzzy suits, but its the same story.  In fact, I had started to pretty much think there was no way to do the play differently if one is to stick to the text.  (In an earlier blog, I wrote about Punchdrunk's adaptation "Sleep No More," a highly creative production, but completely divergent from Shakespeare's text.)  

Last Friday, at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, much to my delight, I was proven wrong.  Alan Cumming, who won a Tony for his performance in Cabaret and is currently appearing on the popular television program The Good Wife, performs almost the entire text alone.  Let me repeat that, Alan Cumming plays every character in Macbeth by himself.  I can safely stop and say this is something I've never seen.  And in the matter of stage spectacle alone, it certainly blows any stilted witches out of the water.  Cumming approaches the Herculean task with energy, commitment, and a complete lack of inhibition.  Performed in an hour and forty-five minutes without an intermission, I personally felt like I had ran about three laps around Central Park's reservoir and then been hit by a truck, and I was only observing. For a good twenty minutes afterwards, my boyfriend and I were unable to speak.  Complete spellbound amazement: something you simply don't find often in the theater. 

But was it good?  Cumming was quite conspicuously not nominated for a Tony for this performance, despite the boldness of the endeavor.  Most of the reviews I read after the show were lukewarm to negative, some even accusing Cumming of being pompous and egocentric to attempt such a thing.  More importantly, they accuse him of not bringing anything new to the text.  After meditating for some time on what I saw, I have to pipe up and say I vehemently disagree. 

Cumming's Macbeth takes place within the frame of a lunatic asylum.  He is brought on during a silent pre-show in which it becomes apparent that he has murdered someone, most likely his entire family.  Before long, the patient is enacting his own version of Macbeth, as the doctors periodically peer in through observation windows and take notes.  The Scottish Play, a story of vast scope and many divergent characters, is now the story of one man's infected mind, one man's torment.  For me, this is where the play really is taken somewhere new.  In past productions that I have seen, the emphasis has always been on the magical elements.  Yes, Macbeth may have a killer instinct somewhere within him, but it never would have been brought out if it wasn't for the witches.  The idea of becoming king is planted in his mind and he becomes evil, while he was noble before.  In this version, any magic that exists is entirely in the patient's mind.  The killer instinct comes from inside of him, from his own madness.  This is a frightening but true aspect of the play that is brought glaringly to the forefront.  He may get the idea from the witches, pressure from his wife, and help from hired hit men, but no one really kills but Macbeth.

For this reason, some of the weaker aspects of the play bothered me less than other critics. Cumming has received much flack for his comedic portrayal of Duncan as an idiotic fop and Malcolm as a talking baby doll.  (Although I daresay the audience loved it.)  The criticism is that these characters were trivialized and he never really bothered to penetrate their psyches.  To this I say:  bah, you missed the point!  Cumming never actually played any of the characters in Macbeth, he only played the patient playing all the characters.  He was not Duncan or Malcolm or even Macbeth, but the patient painstakingly unraveling all of the divergent characters in his mind.  Duncan represents the part of himself that was silly and playful, forever buried by his terrible deeds.  

I will admit that at times during the performance I was bored.  Even with cutting a third of the text, it seemed incredibly long.  Possibly watching one person do all of those parts was simply sensory overload.  I will also admit that anyone who didn't already have a good grasp of the story would probably be irredeemably lost, as there was really no way to keep track of who was talking to who or where the characters were.  But the action was punctuated by some wonderful stage effects, which allowed the pressure to be taken off Cumming for a moment and shake up any boredom by giving us something else to look at.  The use of three screens projecting Cumming's distorted face as the three witches was highly effective and super creepy, as was the tearing open of a bird's entrails during the cauldron scene. Another great moment was Macbeth's death, where the patient attempts to drown himself in the onstage bathtub.  Screens allow us to see Cumming's face underwater, and I daresay the length of time he was under there made the audience gleefully uncomfortable.  (He's been under there for a long time.  Are the lights going to go out?  Is he coming back up?  Is this supposed to happen?  God please let him come back up soon!)

Despite Cumming's impressive breath-holding, the best moment of the play by far was Lady Mac's mad scene.  As doctors observe, the patient steadily loses control of his emotions, as memories of his terrible deeds haunt him.  As Lady Mac laments the inability to rid herself of her guilt, so does the patient, and in this scene the overlap between the two stories is perfect.  Even though we know what he has done, we empathize with him in a deep and painful way.  We know there is no escape, and when the lights go on and we realize he has attempted to slash his wrists, we understand.  This is no longer a play about the occult, about magic, this is a play about regret.  

As he desperately tries to rid himself of the all-encompassing guilt, the foul spot, our own guilts, however small, are remembered.  And I think this is what Shakespeare would have wanted.