Last night I went to the Vineyard Playhouse (3 blocks away) to see a staged reading of William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Macbeth. Although nothing has yet topped the performance of Macbeth at Shakespeare in the Park with Liev Schreiber, this came close. In fact, in its own venue, it was equally as effective. The house was packed, and by the end of the one-hour version of the play, I knew why.
If you’ve never been to a staged reading, it consists of a limited number of players performing different roles with minimal props on a bare stage. The players are generally reading the lines as they perform them, and in this case, there was also a narrator explaining anything that may have been unclear because of scenes that were skipped. She also provided sound effects and introduced the characters as the scenes were set.
The power of Shakespeare’s words to carry us into his story never ceases to amaze me. Whether it be a high-walled garden in Verona, a Mediterranean island in the storm-tossed seas, or the barren heaths of a Scotland under the rule of a treacherous and psychotic King, his universal truths of humanity are no less real now than they were 400 years ago. With only a few lines, deftly performed by a talented cast, the depths of horror to which ambition can drive us are played out as murder follows murder follows murder again. Act 5’s guilt-tormented Lady Macbeth incessantly washing her blood-stained hands in her sleep (“Out, damn spot!”) sends shivers down our spines. And there’s no better time of year than Halloween for the Three Witches’ famous lines:
Double, double, toil and trouble,
Fire burn and cauldron bubble!...
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg and owlet's wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
Double, double, toil and trouble,
Fire burn and cauldron bubble!
On the walk home, I remembered how it is to walk in the dark…next time I’ll remember to take a flashlight since there are so few streetlights. Just before I got to my cottage door, I looked up and stopped dead in my tracks. Stars…billions of stars in an ink-black sky. And I felt small and humble and was reminded of Macbeth’s speech after Lady Macbeth has died:
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
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.
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