Mac Beth (Red Bull Theatre)
Review of the Off-Broadway production of Mac Beth.
Please note that this is a review of streamed title; I unfortunately was unable to see this production during its original run in 2018.
I had been waiting for months in order to see this online. I do not particularly know why this show was standing out to me in the see of options of what I could stream; I first heard about it from an email I got from Red Bull Theatre. I had tried to unsubscribe multiple times to their email list and for some reason it never went through, so I guess I’m stuck in the purgatory of forever receiving their emails.
This was the good thing to come out of it: I was obsessed with this concept the first time I read about it, now I shelled out the $25 to have the chance to stream the title. Perhaps I was so interested in because of the way that it appealed to my generation—I was about these girl’s age when this edition of the play originally came out, or because the premise promised that the lines between fantasy and reality would be blurred.
Anyways, let’s begin this review.
A group of high school girls gather to perform Macbeth in an abandoned lot, and things start to get a little strange.
Cast + Plot
It’s Macbeth. I’m going to be upfront right there, it is a condensed version of Macbeth (it clocks in at an hour and a half, which means ninety minutes. In the original production there wasn’t an intermission) that these girls are reciting. That makes it a bit hard to follow if you are not used to the original play like I was. I have read Macbeth before, but it has also been many, many years since I last read it. Because we are operating on a limited number of girls and on a tiny stage, some of the girls also appear to be playing multiple roles (outside of Isabelle Fuhrman and the girl who plays Lady MacBeth), which makes it even more confusing if you’re not familiar with the source material.
The cast consists of Isabelle Fuhrman, Sharlene Cruz, Sophie Kelly-Hedrick, Ismenia Mendes, Anna Sophia Robb, Lily Santiago, and Ayana Workman. I previously knew of Fuhrman (from The Hunger Games) and AnnaSophia Robb (haven’t seen her on the big screen for a while now!), so I was familiar with those two but did not know any of the other young women in the cast. but my general takeaway is that i felt like these young women were overacting.
And maybe that was on purpose because they were indeed playing high schoolers, making it a play within a play. But at times it felt like it was a bit too much, as Fuhrman’s MacBeth had a penchant for just yelling out things and acting within a very strict range of emotions, while the girl playing his wife just went for it. Since it’s an all-female cast, we see things like two girls kissing, one of the witches literally taking her tampon out of her underwear and throwing it into the cauldron, and random dance party intervals.
Did these work? In a way, yes. It feels youthful and the essence of what they’re trying to get at. Supposedly this edition was based on the cases where teenage girls try to murder their friends (aka the Slender Man case), and we can really get hints of that throughout. These girls seem consumed by their roles, which is where the overacting comes in for me. It seems like they’re lost in fits of passion for the play they’re doing, but it’s broken by spells of looking at their phones while reciting lines, or digging through backpacks to find goodies to cast into the cauldron the witches are brewing.
It’s these moments where the plays and mockery on gender become apparent. There’s a scene where Robb is holding a wine bottle and moving it up and down to replicate a man’s genitals, spurring laughter from the recorded audience lingering just behind the camera. The girls add in occasional contemporary commentary as well, adding in a sense that reminds us that they’re young women largely portraying a male play.
Set Design + Blocking
The stage for this is fairly minimal. It’s a little stream in the middle, a couch in the back, a rusted bathtub in the corner, and then some Astroturf in the front. It’s 100% turf because when Fuhrman is on the ground, in the midst of Macbeth’s dying throes, she’s covered in the little black pellets. When the girls initially enter for their scenes, arriving from whatever after school activity they were at previously, they don’t leave the stage after that. They hide in the corners, behind the couch, or in the bathtub until it’s their time to come back to the forefront and deliver their lines.
One of the most spectacular moments, though, is the scene where the rain starts to fall rapidly onto the stage. There’s an extended five to ten minutes where it’s a downpour on the stage, their uniforms are soaked, and MacBeth is being taunted by the witches and their prophecies. As she stands on the desolate, broken couch that’s placed on the back of the stage, these girls are literally drenched and dripping, moving a lot like the workers would in Hadestown. Every single girl joins in on this scene, no matter their previous role, getting lost in the moment of rhythm. The beginning of that scene, however, is the witches cackling over the cauldron. Robb thrusts a pink umbrella into the air as they toss objects into their makeshift cauldron, attempting to fend off the rain for just a little bit.
Overall Thoughts
I get what they’re trying to do by having a bunch of high school girls perform a play in the middle of an abandoned lot, especially with the connection to the Slender Man case (if you don’t know that one, two girls tried to brutally murder their friend in the name of Slender Man). There are some twists that shall remain unnamed for the sake of not completely spoiling the show, but all in all I finished watching this wishing for me. I think the overacting was an avenue to explore for me, but I’m not sure if it was the answer. Everyone’s tastes are different, and I think my wish is that we knew a little bit more about who these girls were. The added moments that showed their youth were the ones that shone, not the fact they were performing MacBeth, and I wish there were more of those.
