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Macbeth

Reviewed by Bill Raden

Edgemar Center for the Performing Arts

Through Nov. 12

In both the figurative and literal senses, Macbeth can be boiled down to a simple story about a courageous man with a latent predisposition to regicide who loses his head in the most extreme ways imaginable.

Or at least that is the tack taken by director Peter Richards’s lucid and economical, if occasionally eccentric, staging. Richards places the accent on the Bard’s tautly ratcheted blend of Jacobean thriller and grisly psychological horror squarely on Thomas Piper’s progressively deranged and cold-blooded thane. It’s a single-minded descent into insanity.

Call it the “Unhinged Macbeth.”

The supernatural is always used by Shakespeare as a window into the interior battleground of the psyche, or what the Elizabethans called the tripartite soul, and Macbeth has it in spades.

So in addition to giving Macbeth the means, motive and opportunity for the play’s serial killings, Shakespeare throws in some tantalizingly suggestive, albeit satanically unreliable prophecies by the Weird Sisters (Jenny Greer, Christine Sage and Lucia Yamuy). Add to their hallucinatory hauntings the decidedly unnatural Lady Macbeth (a silkily manipulative Yamuy), the most fatale of femmes in all of stage literature.

Those elements both goad Macbeth to fateful action while articulating the interior process of how he loses sight of the bigger picture (i.e., kingship’s place in the natural order), until he can no longer see the forest for the trees of Birnam Wood.

In Richards’s production, that psychological dimension gets its most eloquent and persuasive expression in the graphically eerie projections of designers Hana Kim and Yee Eun Nam, which progress from starkly evocative, fog-enshrouded tree trunks to images suggesting something far more clinical and abstractly microscopic, as if drilling ever deeper into the desiccated pulp of Macbeth’s woody conscience.

Less convincing is the lack of chemical sizzle between the Macbeths, or the abrupt leap that Piper makes after the intermission to the increasingly raving King Macbeth. Sometimes — like in the ludicrous dance in which he leads the court during the banquet scene — he crosses the line into a jarringly risible cartoon lunacy.

Standouts include a supple Evan Lewis Smith as both an amiable and over-trusting Duncan and then as the vengeful Macduff, the sturdy Mark Rimer as the guileless but ill-fated Banquo, and a production design whose gloomy atmospherics are nicely augmented by Anna Cecelia Martin’s low-key lighting and Matthew Glen’s sound design.

Edgemar Center for the Arts, 2437 Main St., Santa Monica; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.; through November 12. (310) 392-7327, edgemarcenter.org/Macbeth.