William Shakespeare's
Macbeth

Macbeth Production Strips Tragedy of Rampant Ambition
Down to Raw Essence By Judy King(Special to the Valley Journal and The Glenwood Post / Independent)

Take a trip to the dark side this Halloween with a ticket to a wild presentation of Macbeth. "The play takes place in the Weird," announces the playbill of this collaborative production of Thunder River Theater Company and Colorado Mountain College Theatre. In his directorial notes, director/set designer Lon Winston astutely frames Shakespeare's examination of evil's eruption in the contemporary zeitgeist.

Winston strips the tragedy of rampant ambition down to its raw essence, and the audience gets to feast on a heady brew of character study with a sprinkling of the supernatural, if that's the way you want to take the Weird Sisters, popularly known as Witches. On a stage studded with stark and twisted bare trees, Winston gives us a hole leading to hell out of which twist red-gloved hands and hideous faces.

The tormenting trio can be emissaries from a cesspool netherworld, or they can hail from the depths of the title character's subconscious, where raging ambition is winning its battle with the warrior's good nature, abetted by the prompting or his power-maddened wife.



Valerie Haugen's black-clad Lady Macbeth winds her way among twisted branches, resolving with horrific clarity to "unsex" herself, shedding the feminine aspect of her nature. Thus she acquires the ruthless strength to eradicate from her husband the "milk of human kindness" of which she fears his "nature too full," posing an impediment to killing his king and seizing the crown.

Macbeth is the most straightforward of Shakespearean villains and Jeff Carlson plays him that way. The Scots hero is no Iago-like sadist, but a good soldier gone bad. The Weird Sisters have touched a nerve that his wife enflames and it tempts him until he kills once and that first murder both robs him of sleep and compels him to a series of heinous crimes.




Like the husband whose hand she willed to plunge the dagger into the heart of the sleeping king, Lady Macbeth writhes in guilt, obsessively washing her hands of metaphorical blood. Haugen masterfully portrays the villainous unraveling even as she struggles to maintain the trappings of a monarchy conceived in treachery.

Winston has artfully cast Haugen in the double role of Lady Macduff, gentle wife and devoted mother, dressed in white to symbolize her moral distance from the ferocious queen. The brave Macduff's wife is touching as she expresses her vulnerability and abandonment since she and her children have been left undefended while her husband plans a military campaign.

Macduff, played by Michael Miller, receives the news of his wife and children's slaughter in front of an audience whose TV screens have been tuned to a sniper's atrocities. Miller delivers the well-known lines "All my pretty ones" in a bewilderment that he turns into revenge before it can congeal into crippling grief.

One of the Shakespeare's most celebrated speeches is Macbeth's despairing rumination when his world is falling down around him. Jeff Carlson, wisely, goes easy here and he recites the "Tomorrow" soliloquy with a subtle understatement, letting the words, perhaps the most pessimistic in English literature, speak simply for themselves without theatrics. Carlson's restraint is mirrored in low-keyed performances by the supporting cast: G. Thomas Cochran's affably gracious Duncan; Ryan Fleming's Malcolm, an orphaned boy maturing into his noble legacy, and Gerald DeLisser's Banquo who summons the moral strength to defy Macbeth.


Dark and stark, bloodied and brooding, Macbeth speaks to us across the centuries of the imperative to triumph over evil, its harsh message more potent then ever in this our witching season.







Lon Winston, Artistic Director
Thunder River Theatre Company

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