First, let's get this out of the way: I'm all in favor of directors taking interpretive liberties with the classics. I can still remember enjoying a version of Gogol's The Inspector General, in which a giant pineapple slowly made its way across the back of the stage, contradicting but somehow also underscoring the 19th-century Russian comedy in the forefront.
And then there was a production of Strindberg's Ghost Sonata in which two lovers, dressed in white robes as if for Asian martial arts, engaged in a strange, tightly choreographed combat while debating the aesthetics of human experience. I saw that one more than 20 years ago, and I still can't think of this Swedish masterwork without remembering those two very un-Swedish figures.
Or what about a production of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, in which a magician with a wand — a character nowhere to be found in the original — stole around the stage, seemingly putting the odd occurrences of this odd romance into motion?
In every one of these productions, the director had a vision and imposed that vision — successfully, I think — on the familiar script being interpreted. And in every case, the imposition made the production more fascinating, certainly more memorable. Sure, Gogol and Strindberg and Shakespeare can be done — stirringly, brilliantly — with great fidelity to the original. But if a director has a fine notion, why not give it a go? If we leave the theater with even a couple of new ideas, we might call the innovation justified.
I say all this as a preface to this simple opinion: There's nothing at all wrong with the Alley Cat Players' decision to present Macbeth with the genders reversed. Theoretically, a production in which Macbeth, Duncan, Banquo and Malcolm are women, and Lady Macbeth is a man, could shine some needed light on one of the best known Shakespeare tragedies. Maybe an excellent actress can show us corners of Macbeth's complex personality that excellent actors tend to miss. Maybe a man can point to details of Lady Macbeth's progress toward death that most women would have left unremarked. By all means, give us a gender-bent Macbeth and revolutionize our understanding of this tale of ambition and madness. The prospect is tantalizing: Macbeth as a woman? This should be terrific.
But it's not, not in this production. These choices leave us unilluminated. Unsatisfied. Unmoved.
And the reason isn't gender; the reason is acting. To put it bluntly, almost none of the 13 performers in this production is of Shakespearean quality. After all, Shakespeare's great characters are complicated, multidimensional, sometimes self-contradicting, evolving from scene to scene. Characters of this quality require not just actors who can speak the great poetry, but actors who can lead us through the several levels of their psyches. And that happens to be a challenge that these Alley Cat Players aren't up to. Again and again, they give us blunt, simplistic portrayals that leave us nothing to discover, nothing even to investigate. If Macbeth were nothing but what Alley Cat offers us here, no one would ever suspect that this was one of theater's greatest works.
Consider, for example, Teresa Elena Gallar as Macbeth. I've had reason to praise Gallar's work in the past, especially in more or less contemporary realist works. But she's not ready for this play. After all, Macbeth, as Shakespeare paints him, is a bundle of contradictions. On one hand, he's a successful warrior; on the other (says his wife), he's "too full o' th' milk of human kindness." On one hand, he's aware of a world of spirit — note his encounters with the three witches; on the other, he's capable of the most complete cynicism ("a tale/Told by an idiot … /Signifying nothing"). He starts the play frightened by his own ambitions; he ends noisily committed to his many crimes and his sense of invulnerability. In other words, this is no cardboard villain; but Gallar plays him that way, as if a haughty look and a sneer could sum up his many parts. Perhaps the scene in which Macbeth learns of his wife's death is the most disappointing of many disappointing moments here. What we should have is an epiphany, a moment of so much despair that the entire universe seems pointless; what we get instead are some famous words declaimed half-heartedly, to no purpose, for no obvious reason, with no appropriate emotion.
And most of the other actors are quite as inadequate. Steve Mountan as Lady Macbeth (called "Lord Macbeth") never convinces us that he's a creature led to madness by crime; Pam Yado is never a regal Duncan; Becca McCoy never makes sense as McDuff; Bridget Bean is an oddly shallow Banquo; and so on and so forth. Only D. Davis, Jeanne Adams and Elaine Goller as the three Weird Sisters, and Jimmy Chang as an Attendant, ever convincingly inhabit their roles; and that's far from enough. Director Jo Averill-Snell moves bodies around the stage well enough, but she fails to persuade us of her characters' psychological journeys. For that matter, she fails to make this company seem professional: there were moments when I felt I was witnessing a particularly troubled community theater production.
There are a couple of hopeful points, though. Travis Horstmann's set, dominated by a delightful faux-stone wall and a spindly-looking throne, is the most attractive that I've ever seen Alley Cat offer. And Kay Pearson's period costumes are nicely coordinated, resulting in a unified look to the whole production. I've regretted some of Alley Cat's designs in the past, so it's cheering to see that, in these cases at least, this company's becoming more demanding.
Next step: to become more demanding of actors and director. I don't say that a young company like Alley Cat shouldn't put Shakespeare on its schedule, gender-bent or not. But find the actors who can handle it and a director who's uncompromising. Shakespeare is serious business. Good intentions aren't enough. What feels like courage might be blind haste.
Gender has nothing to do with it: Female or male, Macbeth deserves better.
Performance Critic Mark E. Leib can be reached at mark.leib@weeklyplanet.com or 813-248-8888 ext. 305.
This article appears in Oct 16-22, 2003.