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Macbett
Daily Herald, January 12, 2001
Chicago Tribune, December 13, 2000
Windy City Times, December 13, 2000
Chicago Free Press, January 10, 2001
Chicago Reader, December 15, 2000
Daily Herald, January
12, 2001
Ionesco’s Macbett, now being staged at
the Chopin Theatre in Chicago, succeeds in being both a brilliant
satire of the Bard’s play and an angry commentary on
20th century life.
Those who know their Macbeth know that Banquo
is one of the early martyrs in that play, that Macbeth murders
him and that Banquo’s ghost ends up haunting him for
the rest of the play. Banquo is killed in Ionesco’s
version, too. But not until he has shown himself to be as
petty and capable of being a murderous villain as Macbett.
But then no one comes out looking good in this
play. Even Malcolm, the hero of Shakespeare’s version
and the so-called hero of this one, who saves Scotland from
Macbett in the last minutes of the play, doesn’t look
good.
Ionesco’s pessimistic moral: We will
be fooled again - and again and again and again. In the hands
of the wrong director, such a play could be depressing indeed.
But not in the hands of Joanna Settle.
Her production of Samuel Beckett’s enigmatic
one act Play, performed as part of the 1999 Around-the-Coyote
Festival, was unforgettable. Staged in a store window - the
futon store one door south of the Chopin Theater - it was
on of the sharpest versions of this oft-produced plays I’ve
seen.
Macbett is a similarly brilliant production.
Not a second of stage time is wasted in this wild production,
which manages to cram into three acts slapstick and tragedy,
vaudeville and high opera, moments of incredible silliness
and bits of satire so cutting (and insightful) it takes your
breath away.
Settle, of course, has a lot of help along
the way. Gavin Witt’s brand new translation of the
original play is every bit as smart as you would expect from
someone named Witt.
And Andrew Lieberman has given her an incredible
set to play on, one with lots of doors so actors can enter
and exit wildly and two long trenches running the length
of the stage. These trenches are visually interesting. Throughout
the show actors leap in and out of them like cartoon characters
in some ‘60s psychedelic cartoon. They also remind
us of the trenches of World War I. (An apt image for a play
as much about war as this one.)
Settle’s “Macbett” is a huge
production with 16 actors. In fact, the production is so
large it took the combined effort of two theatre companies
- Settle’s Division 13 Productions and greasy joan & company.
Leading the cast is Terry Hamilton, whose Macbett
succeeds in seeming at once shallow and murderous, modern
and medieval, utterly corporate and totally evil. Likewise,
Katie Taber turns in a brilliant performance, or rather three
brilliant performances, as Lady Duncan, lady Macbett and
as one of the witches.
But it’s odd to single out individual
performances in a show with as strong an ensemble as this.
It is probably more honest to say everyone does a terrific
job.
You are not going to see as good a production
of this seldom-produced play for a long time to come.
- Jack Helbig -
Chicago Tribune, December 13, 2000
Macbett designer Andrews Lieberman has turned
the expansive Chopin Theatre into something akin to an absurdist
shooting range.
Deep trenches run across the playing area (which
is made of the kind of wooden paneling one associates with
a dated suburban basement) allowing performers to pop up
and down like unwitting targets for a viewer’s gun.
- Chris Jones -
Windy City Times, December 13, 2000
Sound designers Mike Frank and Andrew Pluess
have assembled a densely layered synthesizer score–opening
with a full-scale quasi-World War II air raid–matching
in aural magnitude Lieberman’s visual intricacy. Stacy
Ellen Rich’s costumes include such imaginative touches
as gray-wigged crones delicately balanced on prosthetic spider-canes,
ghostly faces visible only through small glassine windows
in envelope-shaped cloaks like radiation ponchos, and four
utility-players, bilingually representing the voice of the
playwright, garbed in matching tunics emblazoned with “la
mécanique du quotidian.” And let’s not
forget the sequence where a film projector and screen are
simultaneously hand-carried across the stage with such smoothly
synchronized timing that Dave Smith’s cinematic footage
never wobbles out of its frame for an instant.
- Mary Shen Barnidge -
Chicago Free Press,
January 10, 2001
A stunning, anachronistic depiction of warfare,
with Macbett and Banquo, under the tyrannical Archduke Duncan’s
orders, fighting the forces of Candor and Glamiss. As Duncan’s
generals intone, “There isn’t enough earth to
bury so many. . . not enough vultures to get rid of so many
cadavers.” From pantomimed combat to a peculiar encounter
between a warrior and a girl selling lemonade, the shocking
travials of war are well-depicted and well-amped the the
thunderous work of sound designers Mike Frank and Andre Pluess.
Director Joanna settle and set designer Andrew
Lieberman brilliantly utilized the huge space at Chopin Theatre.
The audience witnesses powerful suggestions of warfare, as
swords plunge below sight lines and victims, hands flail
up from the depths of trenches. At other times, the actors
deploy trenches and trapdoors to move according to laws of
cartoon physics, disappearing from one spot to reemerge seconds
later somewhere entirely else.
Katie Taber, Terry Hamilton, James Foster,
and Thomas Groenwald head up a talented cast. If you’re
looking to get jiggy with the Bard, this inventive production
beckons.
- Web Behrens -
Chicago Reader, December 15, 2000
Director
Joanna Settle clearly has an exacting vision; it seems no
element escapes her notice in this production of Eugene Ionesco’s
dark, absurdist romp through Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
On Andrew Lieberman’s sublimely garish set–a severe
expanse of wood-grain paneling and featureless carpet that
lumbers gracelessly almost into the audience’s lap–the
play seems a kind of nightmarish raver party. The tyrant archduke
Duncan is a dissipated, pajama-clad hedonist doted upon by
his ultra fey assistant. His wife, a thrift-store dominatrix
in mile-high heels, betrays him by conspiring with twin assassins,
Macbett and Banquo, who seem pulled from a 1980 new wave clothing
catalog. Once Macbett assumes the throne, he’s transformed
into a maniacal Vegas performer surrounded by sycophantic
minions in white isolation suits and Day-Glo plastic wigs.
Visually this Macbett is always interesting, and Settle’s
use of the Chopin Theatre’s cavernous space produces
more than a few ingenious surprises.
- Justin Hayford -
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