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Stephan Wolfert and Dawn Stern. Photo by Ashley Garrett. |
Seen on: Friday, 8/05/22.
My grade: B
Plot and Background
A two-person, 55-minute deconstruction of Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth, presented by DE-CRUIT, a veteran-founded theater company dedicated to "treating trauma through Shakespeare." Macbeth tells the story of a nobleman just back from battle who hears a prophecy that he will be king and, with the collaboration of his wife, plots first to make that prophecy a reality, and then to remove any obstacles to keeping his stolen crown. Husband and wife are both ultimately destroyed by guilt over their actions and (in the source play) by the enemies they have created along the way.What I Knew Beforehand
I knew that it would be a very physical production, exploring trauma within the trappings of Macbeth, a play I'm pretty familiar with.Thoughts:
Play: I regret that this review is coming out too late to actually help bring a wider audience to the production, but I am grateful I was able to see it before the run ended. Overall I would call this a mixed success. Stephan Wolfert and Dawn Stern, the DE-CRUIT founders who are both creators and performers of this piece, bring a cogent understanding of the source text as well as a clear idea of how they want to extrapolate it to explore different kinds of trauma and trauma responses. While Macbeth is shaken first from battle atrocities and then the murders he himself commits, Lady Macbeth is haunted more by the loss of their infant child, though her complicity in Duncan's death does also contribute to her ultimate unraveling. The performance opens with a movement piece that establishes both characters' trauma motifs--he gasping at some horrific sight and sinking as she holds him, then crawling across the floor; she heaving and panting until finally the stillborn birth is taken from her--before shifting into text. The script focuses chiefly on dialogs between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth or between Macbeth and Banquo (Stern playing both Lady M and Banquo), with dialog from other scenes and characters sometimes reassigned to the married couple to keep to the plot beats. Most compelling within this structure are the witches' prophecy, which here manifest in both actors' seemingly taken possession of to recite, as they move in jerky unison; and the sleeping sequence when Macbeth and his Lady attempt to defy another prophecy--that Macbeth shall sleep no more--by dreaming, and their dreams are built of their trauma cycles, relentless and torturing. Less successful perhaps is the macro story clarity for anyone not as familiar with the source text. My friend who attended with me knew the overall sense of the play but not the play-by-play of it, and had trouble following a number of sequences (especially Macbeth's recitation of the slaughter of Macduff's family, as this was the performance's first mention of Macduff at all). This failing, for me, boils down to a larger issue I've talked about before, when deconstruction or deliteralization is taken to such a degree that it obstructs story, especially for any observers not as steeped in the original text (recent examples include the revivals of Cyrano, Oklahoma!, and Assassins). I'm of the mindset that while having extratextual knowledge (or in this case, just knowing a non-deconstructed version of the thing) can add resonance to the observer, the piece should still stand on its own for an audience member coming to the work fresh.