Shakespeare Festival tour finds ‘fun’ in Macbeth

In the program notes for the Utah Shakespeare Festival's touring 75-minute production of "Macbeth" at the College of Southern Nevada, director Christopher Clark writes: "The instant appeal of directing Shakespeare's 'Macbeth' is, for me, the opportunity to stage witches, ghosts, and murder. There's no getting around that! It's a lot of fun, and it's not every day a director gets to play with demonic supernatural forces -- even pretend ones."

Clark's "fun" approach is in happy evidence in just about every scene. He does justice to the dramatic core of the script -- the destruction of a man due to ambition and guilt -- but there's an abounding lightness that isn't usually associated with this tragedy.

The witches who warn Macbeth of what lies ahead are scary-looking creatures, but not devoid of humor. Costumer Scott Anderson has them tower over the action in oversized puppetlike designs that suggest a child's nightmare.

Benjamin Hohman's appropriately simple set -- little more than white cloth, a single drop and the barest of props -- is made magical by Scott Palfreyman's lighting, which uses plenty of delicious shadow imagery. A barrage of sound effects and a single onstage musician (cellist Jennifer Chandler) bring to the fast-moving action a strong sense of melancholy and suspense. Clark wants us to have a good time, and he succeeds without bastardizing the material.

Macbeth (Aaron Gaines) and wife (Kelly Marie Hennessey) are played, in modern dress, like social-climbing yuppies. Clark resists the temptation to make them evil cartoons. The seven cast members are competent actors, capable of suggesting with few strokes the essence of their characters.

The production doesn't have depth. It keeps things pretty much on the surface, and that may bother some. But it's a legitimate vision and a fine starting point in introducing Shakespeare to high-schoolers (which is the stated purpose of the multi-state tour).

Only twice does Clark patronize his young audience. Once, when a character gets a laugh by dropping his trousers (a cheap device that the festival uses in nearly all its touring plays) and, even worse, when the same character delivers a "knock-knock" joke. Clark doesn't need to resort to this nonsense.

I wonder how he would feel if a high-schooler went home thinking Shakespeare was great because he invented "Knock-knock/Who's there?"

Anthony Del Valle can be reached at vegastheaterchat @aol.com. You can write him c/o Las Vegas Review-Journal, P.O. Box 70, Las Vegas, NV 89125.