THEATER REVIEW: MACBETH

Macbeth (Bo Foxworth) in Macbeth.

Spot on

By Ed Rampell

True confession: Until I attended the Antaeus Company’s luminous production of MacBeth, I had never actually read or seen a stage or screen adaptation of the Scottish play, as it is called. Sure, when I was a lad I attended MacBird!, the 1967 satire that combined elements of MacBeth with the JFK assassination. And I was familiar enough with Shakespeare’s immortal lines to know that “Out, out damn spot!” was not Dick and Jane chasing a dog away from their home.

The good news is that Antaeus’ rendering of the Bard’s tragedy about power mad social climbers made MacBeth well worth the wait for me. The ensemble’s admirable acting, which ranges from the psychopathological to the vaudevillean, is adeptly directed by Jessica Kubzansky. Antaeus has a full double cast -- the “Kinsmen” and the “Thanes” -- of around 20 players each tackling the production on alternate nights. At the premiere the Kinsmen performed, with Bo Foxworth and a not so noble Ann Noble portraying the murderous schemers who would be king and queen of Scotland.

The Antaeus version opens not with the trio of witches, but with a bit of poetic license, adding an entire scene that’s only suggested by the drama’s actual dialogue. In it, MacBeth (Foxworth) and Lady MacBeth (Noble) lament the death of their infant. The loss drives the couple to the brink and actually supplies an explanation for their subsequent power grabbing behavior. Unable to control the course of the natural world (childbirth), in a bizarre form of compensation, the MacBeths seek to seize state power and run the government so they will have some sense of control over a capricious world.

This prelude enhances insight into the lead characters’ motivations and enriches the play’s innately psychological text and texture. With her sheer will to power, come hell or high water, Noble is chilling as she pushes her husband to perform heinous deeds in order to attain then maintain the throne. Along with Hamlet,that other tragedy about those who wear the crown uneasily upon their troubled heads, MacBeth is arguably Shakespeare’s most psychological play.

Indeed, MacBeth says to the Doctor (Steve Hofvendahl) about his sleepless, guilt wracked wife: "Cure her of that." Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain And with some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff Which weighs upon the heart?” Well, what is this if not a prescription for creating psychoanalysis, some 250-plus years before Freud?

But as the personal is also the political, Shakespeare elevates his drama beyond the realm of the mind and into statecraft. Although it’s rarely, if ever remarked upon, a recurring Shakespearean theme is the toppling of bad rulers by a more righteous wing of the elite, which seeks to set things right. This faction fighting leitmotif runs through many of the Bard’s epics, including: Hamlet, Richard III, Measure for Measure, Julius Caesar and MacBeth.

There are too many good actors to cite but allow me to single out Peter Van Norden as a droll Seyton (he also doubles as Duncan), Joe Holt as Banquo and James Sutorius as MacDuff. Foxworth plays MacBeth as if he has a a Napoleonic complex, seeking to make up through swordplay, murder and mayhem what he lacks in stature. Returning to Noble as Lady MacBeth, she is the ultimate henpecker, ever prodding her beleaguered husband on. She’s more terrifying than Scotland’s other infamous horror, the Loch Ness Monster. Noble is positively harrowing with her crimson locks and reddish period outfit, all redolent of her blood obsessed psyche costumed by Jessica Olson, who effectively garbs the rest of the cast in kilts, gowns and armor. (But where was that bagpipes player to complete the scene?)

Scenic Designer Tom Buderwitz, who brilliantly crafted a faithful replica of a British pub in the same playhouse where Antaeus presented Noël Coward’s WWII era Peace in Our Time, has worked his magic againon the diminutive stage, with sets that conjure up castles and misty Scottish moors.

Of course, the real star of this production remains Shakespeare, that inventor of proto-psychoanalysis. As Humanism swept Europe the Bard’s ultimate gift was to dramatize the “double toil and trouble” of the cauldron of the mind. Had he put quill to parchment and wrote the phone book, every time one looked a number up he or she would laugh or weep. Antaeus’ hair raising production does the playwright from Stratford-upon-Avon proud.

MacBeth runs through Aug. 26 at the The Antaeus Company, 5112 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood, CA 91601. For more info: 818/506-1983; www.Antaeus.org.

THEATER REVIEW: PEACE IN OUR TIME

No, el coward

By Ed Rampell

The Antaeus Company -- which “strives to keep classical theater vibrantly alive by presenting productions with a top-flight ensemble company of actors” -- has succeeded admirably in doing so by reviving two great anti-fascist dramas. Both plays presented by Antaeus are alternative histories that imagine “what if” fascism had taken over England and America. 

Noël Coward is primarily remembered as a sophisticated showman, composer of songs such as Mad Dogs and Englishmen and an urbane writer of risqué romances, such as Brief Encounter (about an extramarital affair), Private Lives (which Liz and Dick rather famously revived onstage in 1983) and Blithe Spirit (about a ghost haunting her husband after he remarries). But Coward’s 1946 Peace in Our Time shows that when the playwright encountered Nazism, he was anything but blithe in his spirited drama about the public lives of Englishmen confronting Hitler’s mad dogs.

Peace in Our Time is actually more in the mode of Coward’s 1942 Oscar-winning moral boosting masterpiece World War II film, In Which We Serve, which he wrote, scored and co-directed with David Lean, than his sexy stories. Like Serve, Coward’s love affair in Peace is with England, as Brits battle blitz. John Apicella’s projections of archival footage of the Battle of Britain, etc., help set the scene. During the first act the Third Reich conquers the U.K., and the rest of the two-hour and 45-minute or so play takes place in a London pub where we encounter a cross section of British society.

Just as a school served as a microcosm for Britain in Lindsay Anderson’s 1969 student revolt film, If…, Peace’s pub likewise doubles as a microcosm of an imagined occupied England. There are resisters, collaborators and of course, Germans, in the pub, which is an abbreviation for public house. Antaeus’ Co-Artistic Director Tony Amendola pointed out to me that these drinking establishments played a central role in British culture as a central meeting place, which Shakespeare noted in his plays featuring Falstaff. Scenic Designer Tom Buderwitz has done yeoman’s work and performed marvels in transforming the Deaf West Theatre’s stage into a highly realistic replica of a pub, and deserves kudos for his realism and attention to detail.

Australian Barry Creyton’s adaptation of Coward’s Peace adds nine of Coward’s own Music Hall-style songs that weren’t in the original version of the drama, and they are seamlessly interwoven into the play, accompanied by an upright piano with Richard Levinson tickling the ivories. The ditties obviously serve to liven things up, and numbers such as London Pride, Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans (banned by a humorless BBC!) and Could You Please Oblige Us with a Bren Gun? fully display Coward’s clever wordplay and wit, which Monty Python, Dudley Moore and Peter Cook evolved out of.

Casey Stangl does a far better job directing his ensemble cast than the baseball manager with a similar name did managing the New York Mets back in the 1960s. Unlike the Mets, the Antaeus team never drops the ball, which continues rolling along. As there are 22 speaking parts, and the roles are double-casted on alternate nights, your intrepid reviewer only has space to single a few thesps out who trod the boards opening night.

Steve Hofvendahl is steadfast as Fred Shattock, the stalwart bartender with a slow fuse who precariously presides over his slice of British life. Emily Chase has a masterful, veddy English accent that sounds as if she shoplifted it from PBS’ Masterpiece Theater. Chase alternates in the role of the writer Janet Braid, who personifies patriotic spirit and love of the “sceptred isle,” unblushingly quoting Sakespeare’s  immortal lines -- “This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England” – as a rebuke to the Nazi collaborator. Take that!

As said turncoat, JD Cullum is perfect as Chorley Bannister, the snobby editor who, after the Hitlerian invasion, goes along to get along. However, it seems that this character is supposed to be gay, and if this is the case, it’s sad that Coward, himself a closeted homosexual, would choose to make the Brit who sells out to the Germans a practitioner of the love that dare not say its name (especially under Third Reich rule!). If Coward equated collaborating with being queer and considered homosexuality to be a signpost of a personality or character defect, then the otherwise valiant anti-fascist Coward was here a rather cowardly lion.


Peace in Our Time runs through Dec. 11 at the Deaf West Theatre, 5112 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood, CA 91601. For more info: (818)506-1983; www.Antaeus.org.