In SITI Company’s “Radio Macbeth,” Shakespeare’s play supplies the words, but the drama comes from other sources: a tense love triangle among three of the actors rehearsing a radio version of “Macbeth,” and the whole troupe’s involuntary reactions to the script. Using Shakespeare’s words and DIY sound effects, the actors manage to bicker, show off, and make passionate declarations while falling under the spell of the powerful drama.
The play opens in a dark theater furnished with a few shabby chairs and a couple of mics. A troupe of tired and irritable actors enter, chat, and then fall into silence. As we watch, they shake off their self-absorption just enough to start reciting the lines of Shakespeare’s play. At first, their individual preoccupations inflect the lines, but over the course of five acts, Shakespeare’s language takes over, albeit punctuated by the creaks and crashes of rickety furniture and makeshift props.
SITI’s adept performers make sure the personal element never entirely disappears. The enormously talented and unhappily married couple playing Lady Macbeth (Ellen Lauren) and Duncan/Macduff (Will Bond) hurl their lines around like weapons, while occasionally losing themselves entirely in pure performance. Lady Macbeth’s mad scene serves as a prime example; as she exaggerates and distorts her pitiful speech, the character’s suffering overlaps with the actress’s. As the charming but less talented leading man, and the object of Lady M’s adulterous affections, Stephen Webber provides a painfully funny portrait of a self-confident man who gradually realizes he’s in over his head.
In layering bloody tragedy and bedroom farce, “Radio Macbeth” risks empty cleverness, but directors Ann Bogart and Darron L. West avoid this trap by privileging playfulness and fluidity over any fixed interpretation of “Macbeth’s” emotional and psychological impact. In the end, nothing definitive or life-changing happens to the players. With perhaps one exception, they leave as they entered: self-involved, petty, lost. “Radio Macbeth” puts forth the argument that theater can transform its participants, if only for a couple of hours.
Reviewed by Centerstage!
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