Tag: Shakespeare

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Film Features Film/TV

The Tragedy of Macbeth

Denzel Washington stars as Macbeth, with Bertie Carvel as Banquo, Macbeth’s friend and foil.

If you’ve read any Shakespeare, it was probably either Romeo and Juliet or Macbeth. There are good reasons for that. First of all, they’re short for Shakespeare. Second, they’re both crowd-pleasers. Romeo and Juliet’s tale of doomed young love is relatable. Everyone’s had that first romance that feels like everything in the world depends on it. Shakespeare just took it to extremes.

As for Macbeth, it’s got bad love, greed, and murder — all the juicy ingredients of a good film noir. Plus, there’s the added supernatural element of the three witches, which gives what is at heart a tale of sordid political intrigue a Halloween-y vibe.

Joel Coen knows his way around a good film noir. Along with his brother Ethan, he’s produced some of the best neo-noir in Miller’s Crossing, Fargo, and The Man Who Wasn’t There. Since Coen’s wife happens to be three-time Academy Award winner Frances McDormand and Lady Macbeth is one of the juiciest female parts in all of English literature, staging Macbeth is a natural choice. And when I say “staging,” I mean it literally. The Tragedy of Macbeth is theatrical to a fault. There are no sweeping battle scenes like Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V. When Malcolm’s camouflaged army emerges from Birnam Wood to depose the tyrant our antihero has become, there are only a couple dozen of them. But it’s perfect for Macbeth, which was never intended to be historically accurate anyway. The real king Macbeth ruled Scotland peacefully for 17 years and was, by contemporary accounts, well-liked.

Shakespeare’s description of the “weird sisters” as grave-robbing crones gave us the modern use of the word “weird” as something strange and perhaps icky. But “wyrd” was an Anglo-Saxon word for “fate,” which was already archaic by the time the Bard used it to describe the witches who tell Macbeth some select details about his own destiny. At its heart, Macbeth is a psychological horror story about being destroyed by our own fears of the future.

To explore the wellspring of film noir, Coen goes back to the cinema that provided visual inspiration for films like Out of the Past and Double Indemnity, the silent-era German Expressionism of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu. Macbeth’s castle at Inverness is made up of shadows and suggestion, and the thane meets his witches on a bare stage, shrouded in fog.

The characters, on the other hand, are solid and real. With a Macbeth that is as technically meticulous as he is powerful, Denzel Washington once again makes the argument that he is our greatest living actor. He greets King Duncan (Brendan Gleeson) warmly, then kills him cold-bloodedly, and sits on his usurped throne with a lanky arrogance. McDormand’s Lady Macbeth is the opposite of the gritty realism she won the Oscar for in Nomadland. She plots King Duncan’s murder even as her husband’s letter informing her of the witch’s prophecy catches fire in her hands. When she proposes regicide with the phrase “unsex me here,” Washington seems genuinely unsettled by her ruthlessness. Together, they are not the young couple whose ambitions for playing the game of thrones blinds them to the moral cost, but rather two royals with a long history of scheming for the crown who finally see their chance and take it. There’s not a sour note in the supporting cast, with standout performances by Gleeson, a fiery Corey Hawkins as Macduff, and veteran actor Kathryn Hunter (who was the first woman to ever play King Lear on the English stage) as the three witches.

One aspect of the play Coen zeros in on is, once the foul deeds are done, how empty the prize of the throne turns out to be for the Macbeths. Their celebratory banquets reek of forced merriment, and their subjects obey them grudgingly. Lady Macbeth dies unmourned, even by her husband, and when it comes time to fight for the crown, no one rallies to Macbeth’s side. By the time the usurper king is punished by Macduff’s sword, Macbeth’s fight for power at all costs has already swallowed him whole. Coen has taken Shakespeare’s lesson about the ultimate futility of evil and crafted a starkly beautiful film.

The Tragedy of Macbeth is now streaming on Apple TV+.

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Intermission Impossible Theater

On Stage This Weekend

Plenty to do and see this weekend, from openings to closings.

Opening Friday is Between Riverside and Crazy at Hattiloo Theatre. The 2015 Pulitzer Prize winning play throws the old against the new as a retired police officer is faced with eviction from his rent-controlled apartment in New York City. Directed by Ekundayo Bandele. For info, go here.

Lend us your ears: Tennessee Shakespeare is staging Julius Caesar. Directed by Dan McCleary, the classic about political dysfunction, pride, and consequences runs through October 6th. Grab your toga and go here for info.

Think you can handle the truth? This is the final week for Theatre Memphis’ production of A Few Good Men, the powerful Aaron Sorkin play about a court martial and a coverup. Seating is limited this weekend, but a performance has been added tonight, September 25th. Go here for ticket information.

It’s also the final weekend for Germantown Community Theatre’s Barefoot in the Park, the Neil Simon love letter to young lovers. Get tickets here.

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Intermission Impossible Theater

Nightmare Before Christmas: Tennessee Shakespeare Closes Macbeth

CREDIT: Tennessee Shakespeare Company

Tennessee Shakespeare Company

Michael Khanlarian (Banquo), Paul Kiernan (Macbeth), and the Witches. Through Nov. 4.

Hard as it may seem to believe, winter is coming. It won’t be long before area playhouses roll out stock scenery and turn their attention to holiday favorites. Theatre Memphis opens The 25th Putnam County Spelling Bee this weekend. And there are still a few more opportunities to catch Agatha Christie’s enduring mystery The Mousetrap at Germantown Community Theatre. But if there’s anybody out there who’s not quite ready to put Halloween away just yet,Tennessee Shakespeare Company performs Macbeth through November 4th.

Shakespeare’s witchy meditation on ambition and evil is directed by TSC’s founder Dan McCleary and performed by a company of nine actors. How dark do things get? Here’s what McCleary had to say via the TSC website:

“The witches are our masked Chorus, and a sacrifice is offered to cleanse a world of crimes against humanity. The sacrifice is a man who Shakespeare clearly defines as noble, generous, un-ambitious, indecisive, overly kind, incapable of lying with skill, morally incapable of imagining his own corruption or wrong-doing, courageous, patriotic, regretful, and a good husband and friend. Macbeth is the best of us. What is horrific is that we might be able to explain how he becomes the very worst of us.”

 

Very scary.

Thursday night’s performance is Free Will Kids night. That means up to 4 kids (17 or under) are admitted with one paid adult ticket. 

Tennessee Shakespeare follows Macbeth with a  large cast production of  As You Like It Nov. 29-Dec. 6

General Admission tickets are $39. Performances are Thursday-Saturday at 7 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m.

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We Recommend We Recommend

Shakespeare symposium at Rhodes

CREDIT: Jasa | Dreamstime.com

In 1769 David Garrick, an actor, director, and theater promoter, created a centennial Shakespeare jubilee at Stratford-upon-Avon to start the Shakespeare tourism industry and to promote his own career as an interpreter and inheritor of the figure of Shakespeare. This is also the tipping point when Shakespeare the author starts to become Shakespeare the icon. Two hundred and forty-seven years later, as the world acknowledges the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, Rhodes College offers Memphians a snapshot of the world he left behind.

Instead of focusing exclusively on Shakespeare, Rhodes’ 1616 Symposium covers economics, culture, art, science, performance, the role of women, and the roots of globalism. Symposium guests include Dr. Gideon Manning, an assistant professor of philosophy at Caltech who specializes in Renaissance medicine, and Indiana University’s Dr. William Newman, who’s the world’s foremost expert on alchemy, with a particular interest in Isaac Newton’s secret attempts to make gold in his lab.

Jasa | Dreamstime.com

Dr. Scott Newstok, professor of English Renaissance literature and coordinator for the Pearce Shakespeare Endowment at Rhodes College, describes 1616 as a time “right in the middle of a complicated and powerful political emergence of the idea of the corporation.” Dr. Henry Turner of Rutgers will discuss the medieval and Renaissance origins of treating business interests like people.

This deep dive into 1616 doubles as a portrait of the Bard. “I’m always hesitant to use the word ‘genius,'” Newstok says. “But I think, if you want to talk about Shakespeare’s ingenuity, part of that was clearly his ability to absorb so much of what he saw around him, and so much of what he sensed was topical or timely.”

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Intermission Impossible Theater

King of Fools: New Moon tackles Lear

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Flattery will get you nowhere.

That seems to be a running theme for The New Moon Theatre Company. The scrappy indie staged a fantastic production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman last season and followed it up this spring with a competent and mostly compelling production of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Both plays revolve around characters that are studies in arrested development, brutal portraits of men who grew old but never wise. Shakespeare’s monarch and Miller’s “low man” have even more in common. Both have a weakness for material things and are easily confused by superficial praise and popularity. The two plays are classic tragedies with tragically modern implications.

The story of Lear in brief: an ancient king of ancient Britain, looking to insure a stable path to succession, announces his retirement and also his intention to divide the kingdom equally among three daughters, Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia, his favorite. Before gifting the lands he asks his daughters to say how much they love him. The elder two shower down praise while Cordelia, who feels much but speaks only according to her needs, says she loves him only as much as a daughter should love her father. Lear misunderstands Cordelia’s modesty and the not altogether subtle criticism of her lying sisters. Furiously and foolishly he disowns the “thankless child.”

As any generous father might Lear assumes he’ll be able to spend his twilight years living with his two loving daughters and their happy families. He asks only for 100 attendent knights. He’s denied everything, and turned out to fend for himself in the wilderness. War begins to rumble through the land.

In Act IV the homeless, ragged, angry Lear encounters Gloucester, a nobleman betrayed by his bastard son, then blinded and banished. Gloucester is lead by his legitimate son Edgar, disguised as poor Tom, the mad beggar who’s even more ragged than the king.

“Through tattered clothes small vices do appear,” Lear says of Poor Tom. “Robes and furred gowns hide all.”

Wisdom arrives too late. In one unassuming line the old blustery King summarizes the moment his life fell apart, offers searing commentary on a sheltered, hypocritical ruling class, and describes, quite clearly, a remarkable modern dilemma. Read any comment thread regarding the Memphis and Shelby County school muddle to and be amazed by the language of blind privilege and pretty ideas used to disguise age-old biases.

New Moon’s stylized modern dress production opens strong and finishes strong but loses some momentum along the way.

Bill Baker, who founded the Our Own Voice Theatre Company and works with Playback Memphis is an animated and elfish Lear. Baker is accustomed to working in a more experimental vein, but it’s always nice to see him tackle something a bit more straightforward. The broad physical work he’s championed over the years serves him well here. The old king’s horse-voiced tantrums are childlike and explosive but the language is always crystal clear.

Director Anita “Jo” Lenhart has assembled a strong supporting cast. Kell Christie and Christina Wellford Scott as Regan and Goneril (both powerhouses, both excellent), the always effective Bennett Wood plays Gloucester, and Greg Boller, who played the titular character in Theatre Memphis’ interesting if weirdly misguided Richard III, does some of his most nuanced work yet as Kent, who believes in Lear and remains loyal even after his banishment.

Lear is, among many things, a play about fools and the various meanings of foolishness. Cordelia (an understated Heather Malone) plays the part at times as does Kent, Edgar (Michael Bolinski), and even Lear himself. But nobody out-fools Lear’s court fool played here by,James Dale Green, a versatile character actor who, as a youngster, played Puck in the celebrated Theatre Memphis production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, staged by Ellis Rabb. Green’s Fool is a sad-faced clown in the spirit of Emmett Kelly, and his delivery couldn’t be simpler or more effective. “I’d rather be anything than a fool,” he says to Lear. “But I would not be you, nuncle.” And there’s no doubt that the little tramp means it.

It’s been 50-years since a theater in Memphis last mounted a full run of King Lear. Why that’s the case is a real head-scratcher, all things considered. The show may be more didactic and less nuanced than Othello or Hamlet but, as George Bernard Shaw once noted, one would be hard pressed to craft a more perfect tragedy. This unassuming, if occasionally shocking production may not be perfect, but it’s often very good, and scarcity makes it absolutely precious. Catch it while you can.

Heather Malone and Bill Baker

  • Heather Malone and Bill Baker

At TheatreWorks through April 22. 484-3467

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News The Fly-By

Great Shakes

Dan McCleary gets evangelical about Shakespeare.

And why shouldn’t he? The Bard has been good to this 1985 graduate of Germantown High School who has carved out a niche for himself as an actor and director specializing in the classics.

Over the past 20 years, McCleary has taken on roles ranging from Hamlet and Macbeth (in Hamlet and Macbeth) to playing Sly Stallone’s holographic father in the intolerable superhero flick Judge Dread. Now, it would appear that the next phase of McCleary’s career has begun.

His ambitious five-year plan to create the Tennessee Shakespeare Company, a resident professional theater company in Germantown, is moving forward. Initial fund-raising has been strong, plans for temporary signage and outdoor lighting have been approved by the city of Germantown, and auditions for Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy As You Like It are scheduled for Monday, May 12th, and Tuesday, May 13th, at Rhodes College’s McCoy Theatre.

“We are now an official 501(c)(3),” McCleary boasts by phone. He’s currently in Atlanta directing a production of the classic Servant of Two Masters, adapted by playwright Jeffrey Hatcher, whose Compleat Female Stage Beauty is currently enjoying a successful run at Midtown’s Circuit Playhouse.

“We’ve put a board together. We’re about to launch a website … And we’ve got enough operating capital to get started,” McCleary says.

The director’s Atlanta gig is a free-to-the-public, city-subsidized event performed on the dock of Lake Clara Meer in Piedmont Park and, although McCleary doesn’t make any direct comparisons, it’s clear that this is the sort of event he envisions for Germantown.

“The city really supports this thing,” he says of the Atlanta production. “It’s free. It’s on the lake. It’s beautiful. And it brings in about 1,000 people a night.”

McCleary says his ultimate goal is to create an arts park behind Germantown’s Morgan Woods Theatre, with stages for dance, music, and theater. The city of Germantown votes on whether or not to proceed with plans for the arts park on May 12th.

“Germantown Parks and Recreation has been incredibly supportive,” says McCleary, who expects the vote will be positive.

Although the city has yet to approve the complete Morgan Woods plan and McCleary’s not met all of his fund-raising goals, he says the production of As You Like It has been a go since Germantown approved his signage and lighting proposals.

“We’re using as few instruments as possible — just enough to light the show and to light up the verticality of the trees,” McCleary says. “We’ve got enough light for security and to make sure everyone is safe walking in the dark. But even with all of that, we’ll be using a generator that’s only about half the size of a conventional generator.”

The signs will be hung on the grounds of St. George’s Episcopal Church where the first act of As You Like It will be performed. The second act of the play will occur outdoors on an adjacent parcel of land owned by arts patron Barbara Apperson.

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Lullaby

In only three short years, Debbie Litch, Theatre Memphis’ feisty executive producer, appears to have reversed the storied East Memphis theater’s ruinous and seemingly unstoppable slide. The leaky roof has been patched, the tattered carpets have been replaced, threadbare seats have been recovered, and paint has been liberally applied. One only needs to look at the huge modern wood and glass sconces that now line the walls of the Lohrey Stage to understand that Theatre Memphis is back and better than ever.

Well, the building is better than ever, anyway. Although production quality has improved and Theatre Memphis has staged a handful of superlative shows, productions at the newly restored playhouse have shown a decided lack of consistency. Director Stephen Hancock’s interpretation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is currently running on the Lohrey Stage, is a prime example. Although the set and costume design rival anything one might find on any professional stage, the cast is woefully uneven, with actors who simply cannot handle the material cast in several key roles.

The completeness of Hancock’s dreamscape vision for A Midsummer Night’s Dream is extraordinary. The soundtrack, which seems to include every great song written about the moon in the 20th century, should be on sale in the lobby. The sets are beautifully realized. Hancock is almost completely successful in reinventing Shakespeare’s famous romp in the woods by turning it into a swanky post-modern sex farce, filled with slapstick and slamming doors. He’s encouraged his set and costume designers to reach out and conjure real magic. But Hancock has made grave errors in both his casting and his staging. His extensive cutting and rewording of what is already the bard’s most accessible comedy boggles the mind.

Purists would certainly disagree (as purists will), but there’s no crime in cutting Shakespeare deeply or altering a word here and there to help modern audiences through a minefield of dead idioms. But Hancock’s edit is condescending and intrusive for more Shakespear-ienced observers who can recite passages of the text line by line. Why change a richly descriptive word like “wanton” (still in current use) into “woman,” which is blander and less musical without the added benefit of being synonymous? Why change the colorful adjective “bully” to “jolly,” and then only half the time? Why do anything more than what absolutely needs to be done?

For all of its beauty, there are numerous problems with the design. To avoid sight-line issues, the play is best observed from the upper level. The garishly conceived fairy costumes marry absurd period designs, ridiculous glitter-rock makeup, and clownish, hideously colored antenna-adorned fright wigs. Nausea is assured.

The mask design for Bottom’s ass head — a defining element in any production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream — is beautifully realized. At a distance it looks like the rat cage placed on Winston Smith’s face in the film version of 1984, but up close, it is very nice.

The play’s climactic play-within-a play ends not in riotous laughter but in silence, followed by the sound of Ashley Bugg Brown as Egea (one of the show’s true highlights) noisily sucking the last of her drink through a straw. It’s one of this Dream‘s funniest moments, and certainly its most spontaneous. It’s also telling that for all the famous words, it took a tacked-on gag to bring Shakespeare’s funniest scene to life.

Brown’s antics are joy to watch, as is the comical wooing of Marques Brown who, as Duke Theseus, handcuffs himself to his bride. Melissa Harkness and Jade Hobbs, likewise, display superb comic skills as Hermia and Helena, two Athenian virgins with man trouble. But no matter how much momentum and comic potential these actors build, all action comes grinding to a halt whenever Ian Hunter (Demetrius) somnambulates through his lines.

Hunter isn’t the only actor sleepwalking through his role. Most of the fairies move and speak like the heavily medicated, and Jacob Rickert’s Puck is no exception.

Puck, a knavish prankster sprite who delights in creating chaos, is one of those roles every actor longs to play. The joy he takes in making mischief is one of A Midsummer Night’s Dream‘s greatest delights. But Rickert mouths his lines and shuffles through his stage directions with the energy of a tree sloth.

It’s good that Theatre Memphis is back and showing the potential to produce visionary — even world class — work. But all the packaging is useless if the performers can’t get the job done.