By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
While watching a dress rehearsal of the Bowling Green High School’s production of William Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” the titular character soon to meet his end, almost ended up in my lap.
I’m sure Isaac Sands, the actor playing Macbeth, was aware of his proximity to the audience, and I was aware of how close I was as MacDuff (Eddie Lyons) pressed to achieve his vengeance.
All was well as their fight moved center stage, and soon Macduff would appear on the balcony displaying Macbeth’s “head.”
From the time we meet the witches who foretell all that is to transpire to this grisly display followed by a soliloquy calling for healing, it is was under 90 minutes. The director Jo Beth Gonzalez aims to tighten it a little more.
The Bowing Green High School drama club is presenting this compact and intense “Macbeth” Friday, Nov 1 at 7 p.m. and Saturday, Nov. 2 at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Bowling Green Performing Arts Center. Tickets are $7 students and $10 adults. Click to buy tickets.
This “Macbeth” doesn’t miss a beat, and in fact adds a few given it is set in the Roaring Twenties, complete with a couple flappers dancing.
But first come the witches (Brooke Meyer, Adelina Villareal, and Sophia Skiles) to properly set the ghastly mood.
Meanwhile King Duncan (Jack Scarlotto-Scholl) and the rest of the royalty have gathered to celebrate the victories of the great warrior Macbeth. He’s earned now the title of the Thane of Cawdor.
It is the witches who inform Macbeth of this news, as well as tell him that he will be king, though it is the children of his fellow warrior Banquo (Chidiogo Onyekelu) who will wear the crown into the future, not Macbeth’s offspring.
This sets Macbeth to thinking, his ambition stoked.
He shares all this with his wife Lady Macbeth (Mona Foreman) who is even more ambitious and bloodthirsty than her husband.
Together they will wreak havoc. Murdering Duncan, Banquo, and all of Macduff’s family and household.
All this bloodletting happens within a few feet of the audience who are seated on the stage.
All the plotting, fretting, and hallucination is explained in language as eloquent and fiery as only Shakespeare could devise.The young actors deliver the verses with conviction and clarity, and they move with spontaneity.
In the midst of all this bloodletting, Shakespeare inserts a beautiful comic bit, delivered by Alice Walters as a hungover porter who fancies himself the porter of hell, and imagines the types of characters who may present themselves at hell’s gate.
These visitors Macduff and Lennox (Kas Morrow) discover indeed a hellish scene. Duncan has been slain.
They soon come to suspect Macbeth, though the audience knows his wife is equally at fault. When Macbeth emerges from killing the king, he still has the knife and tells her he did not smear the room with blood per the plan. She returns to complete the task.
Foreman makes for a vicious Lady Macbeth. When her husband seems to weaken she’s quick to question his manhood. And when the psychological toll of the murder settles in she falls apart in grand fashion, wandering in her sleep trying to rid herself of the stain of her crime. “Here’s the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand,” she says.
When Macbeth is informed of her death, Sands get to deliver his reflections on mortality: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
He says that as he awaits the forces of Malcolm (Slayer Porter), Duncan’s son, come to reclaim his throne.
For their part, the young cast has claimed their hold on this classic tragedy. They are hardly idiots, and all their “sound and fury” brings to life this enduring tale.
