Summary 
An uneven production helmed by a Czech director - sometimes painterly, more often heavy handed - benefits from a strong performance in the title role and a lusty young couple at its core. An eerie musical score of songs and sound effects is played live just offstage, and despite a chillingly dark presentation and a lecherous glutton Duncan, the production suffers from protracted and clumsy combat sequences, a bombastic performance style, and an odd use of puppetry.
Design
Directed by Roman Polak. Set by Michael Merritt. Costumes by Nan Cibula Jenkins. Lights by Robert Shook. Sound by Robert Neuhaus. Original music by Lloyd Brodnax King. Fights by Bruce A. Young and David Wooley.
Cast
Kevin Gudahl (Macbeth), Eric Ness (Banquo), Edward Bevan (Fleance/Young Siward), Peter Aylward (Macduff), Susan Hart (Weyward Sister), Ora Jones (Weyward Sister), Linda Kimbrough (Weyward Sister/Lady Macduff), John Malloy (Duncan/Old Siward), James Fitzgerald (Malcolm), Frank Nall (Donalbain/Doctor), Robert Scogin (Ross), Greg Vinkler (Lenox/Murderer), Christine Calkins (Lady Macbeth), Peter Siragusa (Porter/Murderer).
Analysis
Kevin Gudahl's muscular but intellectual Macbeth first appears within Shakespeare Repertory's visually despairing production as a sweat-soaked, battle-weary warrior who strips almost nude to take advantage of an upstage rain shower. He and Banquo, bruised and bloodied, are at the peak of their lives: youthful but not young, experienced but not jaded, battle-wise but not broken. They bathe together in friendship and camaraderie as well as in a kind of baptismal or ritualistic cleansing, while downstage falling leaves swirl in an autumnal spotlight and bare wooden branches sway eerily overhead. The evocative moment follows a series of awkwardly staged individual combats that serve as a clumsy prelude, with heavily armored soldiers slowly swinging heavy swords and shields, grunting and shouting with exaggerated effort. The overlong prelude - burdened by slow motion stage pictures - becomes interminable overkill with repetition, although Gudahl's striking subsequent scene elevates the beginning of the production.
Czech director Roman Polak, working with designers, cast and crew through an interpreter, conjures a fiery and passionate young couple in Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, revealing in interviews that he conceived of them as "Romeo and Juliet, eight years later."
Polak's dark and sinister production, performed in repertory with an impossibly sunny cartoon version of Pericles, features a bare-wood stage scattered with burnt autumnal leaves and barren branches. Dark and shadowy, the stage yawns with trap doors like opening graves and the chilling presence of an abandoned sleek-black baby carriage. In the shadows offstage left perches Lloyd Brodnax King, a musician who wrote the eerie score and plays it in its entirety solo onstage. He remains visible throughout the production, sometimes seated and playing percussion with cymbals and drums and at moments beating tribal-sounding rhythms upon a plastic water jug. The music, always raw and haunting, varies from the wail of a saxophone and the soft tones from a flute to King's pounding of his own chest, chanting ("King of Scotland!"), humming, and crying out in animalistic caterwauls.
Gudahl's Macbeth, brawny enough to be a convincing medieval warrior, has the sandy-haired good looks of a romantic leading man as well as the stern expression and glaring eyes of an ambitious villain. Gudahl's chemistry with Christine Calkins as Lady Macbeth, however, plays as one dimensional: they seem to fiercely recite their intellectual ideas as asides, away from one another and toward the audience, and their emotional passion is all showy breast-beating theatrics within a private spotlight. Gudahl and Calkins do project a seething sexuality, however, seeming much like a youngish couple in love, perhaps married just a few years and unwilling and unable to keep their hands off of one another. Gudahl grunts and groans, carnally crawling after her, and Calkins, sweet of face and attired in lacy black, almost negligee-like outfits, is all slinking and seductive pouts and poses, looking innocent but behaving with sexual abandon, using sensual teasing as a weapon and a means to an end. When close together they embrace and paw each other, convincingly moaning and exclaiming. When Gudahl's Macbeth argues compellingly against the murder of Duncan, she strokes him from behind and kisses him, planting seeds of doubt, and by the time she maneuvers him to the ground and mounts him, her hands on his chest, he has agreed to do whatever she wants.
Polak depicts a gruesome trio of witches, slithering like animals but wrapped in soiled bandages like evil mummies or the unburied battlefield dead. With the "double double, toil and trouble" incantation excised - perhaps to minimize the potential silliness of the childhood rhyme - Polak's witches are consistently hideous and malevolent, elements of the nihilism out on the blasted heath, tearing down the dignity of Gudahl's black-on-black-robed Macbeth. With the lady's sexual favors also pulling at him - as is unworthy old Duncan, a drunken lecher munching noisily on a game-bird drumstick as he leers at and paws Macbeth's Lady - the fate of Gudahl's Macbeth is very nearly sealed with little determinism of his own. Later, the other Thanes gather in an exclusive circle to discuss the murder of the King, and Macbeth again finds himself an outsider.
Gudahl's Macbeth seems to eventually become disgusted with himself and his actions but is unable to change his behavior. As he gradually dehumanizes, his shoulders sag, his eyes darken and become shifty, and he alternates between fits of rage and expressions of moral agony. Calkins' child-bride Lady is less a success, albeit in a less showy role: to her credit, she exudes a lusty appearance with an innocence and vanity in demeanor that in combination is a realistic breeding ground for resorting to regicide as a justifiable means to a worthwhile end. For the banquet haunted by Banquo, Polak provides another memorable stage picture - the gathering at the banquet is so painterly as to resemble a masterwork from Rembrandt - but follows it with a disconcertingly silly series of sights and sounds, from a silhouette of the murdered Banquo, to disembodied hands, speaking babies, and floating puppetry. The weakness of the scene does not subvert the overall production, but the pace of the tragedy falters upon a crucial moment when it should be gathering speed.
Polak's less than subtle approach to the lyrical poetry would have benefited from more restraint and less exclaiming, but he does manage a slew of strong moments in the production's second half. One of the hired assassins at the Macduff household plays as a chilling psychopath, like a wild-side older brother or wicked uncle with a penchant for sudden and extreme violence, and the body of Calkins' Lady Macbeth is found tragically swaying upstage from a noose. Polak's conclusion, arrived at within the fits and starts of memorable staging, is diminished by more drawn out battle sequences - the duel between Macbeth and Macduff is tediously long, especially since the outcome is fated - and Polak's production lurches to its admittedly haunting closing image: Malcolm lingers in the pale light of the falling leaves, obviously prone to the same dark ambitions as his predecessor.