Zinnie Harris, who wrote and directs Macbeth (an undoing), gets one thing right: the title. She undoes William Shakespeare’s classic, all right. Her goal looks to be what’s often known as tinkering with a classic to make it meaningful for a contemporary audience — to rearrange it here for, say, today’s #MeToo crowd.
So, Harris has gone about undoing it, perhaps thinking the adage prevails about every powerful man being backed by an even more powerful woman. That much is indisputably true of this version. To start, the three witches cast a spell on the ambitious Macbeth, who goes home to a wife ready to unsex herself on his — on their — behalf.
How does Lady Macbeth undo it? At great length. Remember that The Tragedy of Macbeth is considered William Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy, and Harris could be said to extend it from The Tragedy of Macbeth to something more like The Tragicomedy of Macbeth.
Yes, along the Macbeths tragic way, the pioneering Harris goes for laughs and elicits them. She accomplishes this mostly by having the murderous couple speak many of Shakespeare’s lines as written but from time to time enhance(?) them with the way us 21st-century folk speak, peppering much of what we say with forms of the ubiquitous f-word. It’s uttered initially with the line, “Hail the Thane of f***king Cawdor.” Indeed, not since the updated Juliet in the now long-running &Juliet musical — which has the 14-year-old bring down the first-act curtain with the word “shit” — have we heard anything as audaciously repugnant as the put-upon Bard’s Lady Macbeth closing this first act with an exasperated “fuck.” (Historical record: The word is known since 1475, but Shakespeare, who perhaps knew and used it, never included it in the plays.)
And what changes and embellishments emerge as Harris wages her Macbeth undoing? Following the familiar plot, she comes up with so many doozies that where to start is challenging. Maybe with the Thane and Thaness as parents. This Lady Macbeth (Nicole Cooper) reports that before defiantly asking to be unsexed, she has “suckled.” Later it’s mentioned that Macbeth (Adam Best) and she have had five children, all of whom have died.
So, there’s Harris’ answer to fans who’ve wondered over the years about the Macbeths’ parenting history. What’s raised, though, is a question about how Lady Macbeth’s mother’s despair gibes with her earlier determination to be unsexed. Suddenly, she doesn’t seem like that kind of woman.
Which leads to Harris’ treatment of fertile Lady Macduff (Emmanuella Cole). Whereas the poor woman — whom Shakespeare depicts mostly as she and her children are slaughtered — now appears in an enlarged role. Entering earlier, Lady Macbeth and she are identified as cousins, close at first but slowly estranged.
But this Lady Macduff, visibly pregnant almost throughout, is no blushing Rose. It’s quickly revealed she’s been having an affair with Banquo (James Robinson). As a result, whether MacDuff (Thierry Mabonga) is the biological father to the new-born son, is up in the air.
And what about womanizer Banquo, whom the homicidal Macbeths want to get out of the way for the threat he poses to their hoped-for dynasty? They think they’ve done him in, but have they? Incidentally, it’s not a dagger that hallucinating Macbeth sees before him at the disrupted banquet he and wife throw. It can’t be because the rival is supposedly done in with bullets. And furthermore, whether Banquo is dead is in question.
As for the reoriented Macbeth, he’s now more than reoriented. He’s disoriented, so much so that guilt reduces him to his bed, no longer to Dunsinane and Birnam Wood. (The fateful locales are mentioned.) He’s the one caught obsessively and forlornly washing his hands of the infamous damned spot. Lady Macbeth’s guilt doesn’t leave her off the bloodied hook, either. It offers her a blood-red sequence that won’t be detailed here.
The sum of these devisings, along with others not itemized, may convince one ticket buyer or another of Harris presenting a Macbeth that emphasizes the play as making a strong statement about women’s equality — and potential equal corruption — to men. Actually, the accumulating silliness of the playwright’s sketches mitigates against Macbeth (an undoing) having the effect Harris apparently is after.
Trying to accomplish as much as she approaches the curtain, she doesn’t know how to get there and simply goes on beyond duty’s call and observers’ patience.
Curiously and ironically, Harris’ wayward piece of written tinsel receives, under her direction, a golden production. Along with a hard-working and polished cast (including those already mentioned, along with Marc Mackinnon, Star Penders, Laurie Scott, and Taqi Nazeer), she has going for her an elegant Tom Piper scenic design, soigné Alex Berry costumes, Lizzie Powell’s lighting, and Pippa Murphy’s sound.
When Macbeth (an undoing) begins, impressive Liz Kettle as a character named Carlin (she’s also a witch with Cole and Penders) welcomes patrons. She says “Knock, knock,” wanting to prompt the standard response to the old joke: “Who’s there?” She might just as well have asked, in reference to the production about to unfold, “What’s there?”
The ringing answer could be, “Not a lot.”
Macbeth (An Undoing) opened April 11, 2024, at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center and runs through May 4. Tickets and information: tfana.org
