Pasadena’s A Noise Within is staging Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The production, directed by Andi Chapman, runs through March 9th. The theater is extending complementary tickets to first responders and fire victims.
We recommend you go. At once.
The play dramatizes the Scottish nobles Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s pursuit of the Scottish throne held by King Duncan. The Macbeths turn murderous after Macbeth undergoes a first visitation by daemonic beings.
Speaking of the daemonic, I have two things in common with the monarch of England (1603–1625) and Scotland (1567–1625) King James I: to have written a daemonology (his is titled Daemonologie; mine, Satan’s Secret Daughters: The Muse as Daemon), and to have attended Shakespeare’s Macbeth, he at the royal court; I, most recently, at A Noise Within.
The English terms “daemon” and “demon” derive from the Greek term δαίμων, transliterated as daímōn.
For the ancient Greeks, daemons were uncanny powers intermediate between the immortal and mortal realms. In possessing you, a daemon delivers you from your ordinary life to your extraordinary fate. Plato’s Symposium names Eros a great daemon, something to consider before your next rendezvous.
Christianity rendered daemons a matter of the satanic.
Christianity rendered daemons a matter of the satanic, as the term “demon” connotes in English. King James’s Daemonologie insists that witches exist, that their daemonic influences are real, and that these satanic beings must be searched out and punished, even executed.
No malevolence was necessarily involved with the daemonic for the Greeks. Daemonic influence could be exalting. In Homer’s Iliad, when the goddess of warfare Athena possesses Achilles and drives him to his warrior apotheosis of killing the Trojan champion Hector, Athena acts as Achilles’s daemonic muse of battle.
Back to Macbeth. Rather than Athena, the Roman goddess of warfare Bellona inspires Macbeth, or so suggests the Scottish nobleman Ross, who calls Macbeth “Bellona’s bridegroom” in reporting to King Duncan how valiantly and utterly Macbeth has defeated the forces ranged in rebellion against the Scottish monarch.
“Bellona’s bridegroom”: the phrase implies both Macbeth’s warrior apotheosis and Macbeth’s openness to daemonic influence. Cue Macbeth’s witches, who precipitate Macbeth’s turn from open champion of King Duncan to secret plotter against King Duncan.
How does director Andi Chapman handle Shakespeare’s daemon-soaked play? The short answer is, superbly.
Chapman precedes the play with a brief pantomime that humanizes the Macbeths. This pantomime (which I won’t spoil by describing) prompts the audience to embrace and identify with Macbeth (Kamal Bolden) and Lady Macbeth (Julanne Chidi Hill), sidestepping any preconceptions of the two as monstrous or inhuman audience members may harbor due to the play’s reputation or having attended previous productions.
Rather than demons, the Macbeths are just people, like you and me, yet after the pantomime they engage the daemonic soon enough.
The production is set in New Orleans at the turn from the nineteenth century to the twentieth. This allows the play’s three witches, the Weird Sisters, to be something of voodoo priestesses. Vibrantly played by Mildred Marie Langford, Joy DeMichelle, and Roshni Shukla, these witches bring the daemonic into the play and set Macbeth onto the path of his fate.
Encompassing a series of increasingly horrible murders, this is the fate Macbeth repeatedly hesitates to accept and Lady Macbeth repeatedly chides him to embrace. Bolden and Hill excel in giving us a Macbeth and a Lady Macbeth fully human yet given over to daemonic influence.
Chapman’s directorial choices underscore the Weird Sisters’ shaping of the wider reality of Macbeth’s fate, beyond Macbeth’s ken, even as Macbeth attains the Scottish throne.
In this regard, two very canny directorial choices playgoers should make sure to notice entail the following questions: who is the third assassin who shows up to assist the two killers Macbeth hires to murder his comrade Banquo (Michael Boatman), and how does the dead Banquo rise and march off to haunt Macbeth?
The simple yet effective theatrical magic, a startling ruse of presence and absence, by which this production stages Banquo’s ghost haunting the Macbeths’ celebratory banquet, had me unnerved and anxiously searching the stage for the specter.
With this banquet, the Macbeths’ fortunes peak, and the undertow of the fate the Weird Sisters have conjured for the couple begins to flood their existence.
Despite the lit candle she orders always be with her, Lady Macbeth enters darkness without return, and Macbeth suffers a series of reversals of the Weird Sisters’ equivocal prophecies. And there’s Macbeth’s famous soliloquy on the signification of nothingness. Chapman’s direction and the compelling performances of Hill and Bolden give fresh vitality to these elements of the play long familiar to Shakespeare fans.
A facet of the play this production taught me to appreciate is how, at his end, Macbeth momentarily escapes the coils of the Weird Sisters to again be “Bellona’s bridegroom,” a courageous warrior taking a stand, if only for a fleeting instant.
A Noise Within has staged a number of very memorable Shakespeare productions. The company’s The Winter’s Tale from the 1996–97 season comes to mind, as does the Anthony and Cleopatra from the 2011–12 season. In my judgement, this Macbeth joins that number.
In sum, about attending Andi Chapman’s Macbeth at A Noise Within, let Lady Macbeth be your guide: “Stand not upon the order of your going, / But go at once.”
Deets
- Local News Pasadena’s interview with Andi Chapman
- Macbeth, A Noise Within, 3352 E. Foothill Blvd., Pasadena
- Schedule and tickets are available at the A Noise Within Web site or by calling the box office at (626) 356-3100.
