Summary 
Brilliantly conceived and imaginatively executed version of the Scottish tragedy, brimming with evocative sound effects, stunning visuals, and a heavy dose of creepy occult witchcraft. A visceral, shocking, and memorable production.
Design
Directed by Christopher Johnson. Set by Martin McClendon. Lights by B. Emil Boulos. Costumes by Michelle Lynette Bush. Sound and original music by Brian and Matthew Callahan. Fights by Robin McFarquhar.
Cast
Krissy Shields (Lady Macbeth), Christopher Thometz (Macbeth), Geoff Coates (Banquo), David Skvarla (Ross), Michael Mazzara (Lenox), Jim Slonina (Malcolme), Will Schutz (Duncan), Richard Ragsdale (Seyton), Sean Sinitski (Macduff), Lisa Rothschiller (Lady Macduff).
Analysis
The Defiant Theatre Company opens Macbeth on a blustery evening a few nights before Halloween. This fiery company's most ambitious effort to date, Macbeth employs a cast of twenty-three amid typically Defiant theatricality - puppetry and makeup, black-hooded goblins and goat-headed devils, nudity and vivid costumes, eerie sound effects and thunderous original music, even animal sacrifice and demonology - in an examination of guilt that focuses more on consequences than on ambition.
Director Christopher Johnson's set features an elevated, circular stage with massive wooden doors upstage and barren trees stage left and right. The ceiling is low, the lighting claustrophobically close to the performers' heads, and ample sound effects include hooting owls, chirping crickets, and rising Scottish winds. With an audacious visual style that recalls Buffy the Vampire Slayer with its ghastly demons as well as The Blair Witch Project with its creepy symbology, Johnson depicts the damnation that ensues from Macbeth's "vaulting ambition."
Three black-eyed witches, overtly sexy and nearly naked, writhe and chant, clad only in thin rags, and the feline movements of the lead witch are mirrored as if in incantation by her two "sisters." Before 1.2, they slink among the battlefield dead, sniffing the bodies like animals and, as if vampires, bite the necks of the injured to finish them off. When Macbeth and Banquo approach, the young witches erotically caress Macbeth, pawing him like curious cats, and they drive Banquo to his knees with paralyzing witchcraft. Later, in 3.5, they bare their breasts to suckle demonic infant puppets, and their nubile presence and influence remains a constant.
Johnson leaves Shakespeare's text virtually uncut for this three-hour epic, mostly trimming the fourth act, and he adds wordless vignettes to illuminate motivations. For example, in a brief prologue, Lady Macbeth ascends the circular stage, wearing a white-hooded shawl and carrying a crooked staff and a flower, and she kneels before the marker of the grave of her young child. She then paces in a circle to cast a spell, but to the sound of a weeping infant, and as the three Weyward sisters laugh at her despair, she collapses in grief. The brief scene adds depth to Lady Macbeth's conscienceless ambition and to her husband's disappointment in his lack of successors. Later, a wizard-like Malcolme kneels at the center of the candle-lit circle, prepares a gunny sack that apparently contains a live, twitching animal, and in a white magic ritual, he kills the creature with a strike from a dagger to summon the winged angel Belial. Belial enters from the upstage doors and pounds a magical sword into the stage, exchanging the weapon for Malcolme's animal sacrifice. The contrasting Dark Ages sorcery complicates - and intensifies - the usually clearly defined conflict between the depraved and the righteous.
Johnson emphasizes witchcraft and incantations throughout the play. Beginning with Lady Macbeth walking in circles with her crooked staff at her child's grave, circular movement becomes a thematic strand: the cerebral Malcolme paces in an apprehensive circle after 1.2, and his sudden stop and peals of thunder intimate that he has cast a spell against the traitorous Thane of Cawdor; Lady Macbeth walks in circles while reading the 1.5 letter, then steps forward - "unsex me here" - into a white glare; Macbeth circles his murderers while issuing ruthless 3.1 instructions; the witches circle their cauldron in 3.5 to summon the monstrous Hecate; black-hooded "familiars" creep backward counter-clockwise during 4.1 as the visions are summoned for Macbeth; and Malcolme circles Macduff clockwise in 4.3, casting another of his positive spells.
The 4.2 murder of the pregnant Lady Macduff and her son seems both a political maneuver as well as a spiteful attack upon fertility. Upon an empty stage surrounded by leafless trees - and with his childless wife and "barren scepter" - a bitter Macbeth sends his assassins, lead by a demonically white-faced Seyton, also the third murderer of Banquo. With a spell, Seyton drives Lady Macduff against a wall and down to the floor, and with a motion he slowly drives her legs apart, exposing her swollen belly in a grisly scene that concludes with her piercing scream in a blackout.
The childless Lady Macbeth is played with youthful vibrance, seething sexuality, and frantic frustration over her political position. She keeps her long hair in a tight braid and wears a blood-red gown slit up the sides and sleeves to reveal some of her flesh. At her 1.5 encounter with Macbeth, she leaps into his arms and wraps her legs around him for a passionate kiss. She then seduces him into murder by suggestively taking one of his fingers into her mouth and dropping to her knees. When the aroused Macbeth lies on top of her, she re-takes command, rolling over to mount him and pin his arms to the stage.
Christopher Thometz plays Macbeth as a frustrated and uncertain warrior, prodded into political ambition by his wife. He is first seen kneeling in spot-lit prayer and taking a host as the body of Christ. The lusty Lady Macbeth does not infuse him with courage so much as resolve, as he seems more confused than afraid. Macbeth's 1.3 rising ambition at becoming Thane of Cawdor is spot lit and observed by his colleagues, as is his expectation of more than gratitude from Duncan at 1.4. Finally, Macbeth's incredulity at the naming of Malcolme as heir to the throne leads to the "fatal vision" that is sealed with a bracing kiss from the sanguine Lady.
Johnson presents the 2.2 murder of the King as a literal opening of the gates of hell and an unleashing of demons. Duncan sleeps center stage beneath an immense white sheet that flows toward the audience, draping over the edge of the circular stage. Skinned animal carcasses from hunting expeditions can be seen hanging from racks upstage. Thometz' Macbeth takes the dagger from a black-hooded familiar, and as drums beat and cymbals crash, he repeatedly strikes the King. The upstage doors begin to creak slowly open as a demonic figure rises from a downstage trap, concealed for a moment beneath Duncan's sheet. The sheet falls away to reveal a towering Seyton, dressed in black, his dark eyes glowering. From the gate behind him, boar- and goat-headed devils emerge from hellish lighting to scurry across the stage and through the aisles of the theatre. Macbeth's damnation becomes final with this visceral theatricality, his ambition later re-summoning Seyton as the white-faced third murderer of Banquo, and his bloody actions finally transform the murderer into a towering, black-streaked white demon with wings, horns and cloven hooves.
The satanic Seyton is portrayed with calculated malevolence, assisting Fleance in escaping to ensure Macbeth's future downfall as the other murderers growl like animals while repeatedly stabbing Banquo. After the assassins flee, Seyton strides to Banquo's corpse and blows a spell upon his body, which rises as a zombie to follow him offstage. Seyton, still in white-faced human form for the 3.4 banquet - the only guest who does not rise and knock over a stool as Macbeth rants in horror at the ghost of Banquo - is pointedly summoned as a servant three times by the distracted Macbeth in 5.3 before appearing as the horrific white devil.
Johnson's stunning theatrical style - strobe lights, blackouts, even a blinding blast of light directly into the audience as the newly crowned Macbeth is seated within his throne - also features bold use of puppetry and masks. The 3.5 summoning of Hecate includes the appearance of an eight-foot demonic skull with glowing red eyes behind the upstage doors. Lithe black arms and enormous skeletal-white hands reach across the stage, operated by the nearly invisible familiars. Also, the 4.1 visions include a bloody infant suspended upside down, and Banquo's lineage of seven Kings features monarchs attired in increasingly modern royal purple clothing, culminating with Banquo himself in a dapper business suit.
Johnson stages the concluding battle with similarly astute choices. The white-faced zombies of Duncan, Banquo, Macduff's son, and Lady Macduff eerily fight on Macbeth's side as invincible ghosts in their own personal damnations. Though mortally wounded in the fight sequences, the zombies re-rise to continue to wage battle, only succumbing to Malcolme's "blessed" sword from Belial. The situation includes a macabre confrontation between Macduff and the ghost of his murdered wife, and the combat includes crashes of maces and axes, swords and spears, helmets and shields. The final conflict between Macbeth and Macduff, fought in billowing stage fog, is portrayed as Macduff's revenge, with Malcolme's white-magic-induced victory subtly downplayed.
As Macduff and Malcolme leave the battlefield, the witches re-take the stage, taking Macbeth's final breath - and soul - as if they were cats stealing the breath of an infant child. Then the upstage gates creak open again, revealing a swarm of devils within fiery orange lighting. To the sound effects of crackling flames and wailing anguish, the devils emerge to drag Macbeth's corpse into hell. The doors close with a portentous bang as the production concludes in a dramatic blackout.
This spirited staging of the Scottish tragedy excels, because like Macbeth's mind, Defiant's production is full of scorpions: dangerous, bursting with the wicked, and fascinating to behold.
Note: A version of this article was edited and published in Shakespeare Bulletin, Vol.19, No.3, Summer 2001.