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Published at 12:21pm
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Pete Guither’s high-def projections of intricate patterns across naked actors is eye candy on the order of a laser-light show, and in the past he and Living Canvas have found plenty of ways to convey abstract narrative through muscular stage movement. But his application of the technique to the Scottish play is baffling.
Cutting Shakespeare’s ghost story down to a handful of sound bites and its cast to protagonist, wife and witches, Guither aims to reveal the “love story that gets lost in all of the carnage.” While there’s certainly a love affair—with power—at the center of the play, neither this nor the “romance” of lady and thane comes across. What does is something more like the Monty Python sketch in which members of the Barley Townswomen’s Guild “reenact” Pearl Harbor by beating each other with handbags in a muddy field. Vanessa Pasini’s movement and combat aren’t bad, and performers as graceful, attractive and undressed as these are hard to dislike. But Guither’s edit makes no compelling case for even trying to do Macbeth this way.
The bigger-picture problem: There’s an inherently humanist message behind the Living Canvas idiom, embracing the literal and figurative honesty of nudity, and it couldn’t be less well-suited to this tale of ambition, dread and deception. Guither’s projection method is so out of touch with the play, it’s not even used to convey a certain stubborn spot.
