Theater Review—

Noble ‘Macbeth 1969’ At Long Wharf

By Julie Stern

NEW HAVEN — It has become a common theatrical ploy to update a Shakespearean play to a more modern time period. Usually this entails little more than using interesting costumes and a few anachronistic props. Westport did it last year with Twelfth Night, without deviating from the Bard’s language. Joe Calarco’s Shakespeare’s R and J, staged a few years ago at TheaterWorks Hartford, used the device of a group of students staging the play at their repressive Catholic  high school,  to have the  theme of doomed love between Montagues and Capulets reflect an undercurrent of  forbidden homoeroticism existing among the boys.

At New Haven’s Long Wharf, you can be sure that whenever Associate Artistic Director Eric Ting turns his hand to something, it will be a bold and creative venture. Thus this year we have Macbeth 1969,  set in a V.A. hospital during the Vietnam War, using six actors to play all the parts, and keeping to the language of the original, but re-arranging at times, who says what, and to whom. Performances continue on the theater’s main stage until Sunday afternoon.

Why set it in a VA hospital, you may ask. And why have the three witches moonlight as three nurses — who also happen to be Lady Macbeth, Lady Macduff, and Mrs Banquo? What does Eric Ting have in mind here?

In the program notes Ting explains that he was inspired by a 2010 Smithsonian Magazine article about Shell Shock in the first World War. This made him think about several friends of his who suffered from PTSD as a result of their service in Iraq, and he began to see a universality in the experiences of soldiers throughout history who returned from violent, tragic, essentially pointless wars. In addition to their physical wounds, many came home haunted by nightmares, depression, paranoid suspicions, and ungovernable rage, which transformed them from the men they were before they went to war, and shredded the fabric of their domestic relationships.

Whether the condition is labeled shell shock as World War I physicians diagnosed it, or battle fatigue, or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as military psychiatrists categorize it today, it is a devastating problem, all the more insidious because there are no obvious physical signs that the soldier has been wounded. (Thus the famous incident where General Patton slapped a hospitalized GI in the face and accused him of cowardice.)

In his interpretation of Macbeth, Ting posits a sort of “what if?” What if Macbeth was suffering from hallucinations brought on by PTSD? In Shakespeare’s time there would have been no explanation for the visions, save a supernatural one. Holinshed’s Chronicles — the historical source Shakespeare used — suggested that Duncan had been a poor king, and Macbeth had just come back from fighting heroically in an unwinnable war.

Taking Shakespeare’s play, familiar to virtually everyone who completed ninth grade, and conflating it with life on a Vietnam era hospital ward, takes on a new logic of its own. It’s a December evening in the Midwest heartland. As a heavily bandaged Banquo and an apparently unscathed Macbeth share adjoining beds, three nurses flit about the ward, listening to Christmas music on a radio, tending to their patients, and bantering among themselves, in the language of those famous three witches.

The gunshot sounds and rocket flare lighting of a thunderstorm punctuate the stage. Is this Macbeth’s heath, or is it flashback to combat? By having the actresses who play the nurses morph into other figures in his life it is just possible that all this can be a horrible dream. If not, the transformation of Macbeth’s personality from loyal soldier to power-maddened tyrant is one more symptom of his illness.

Duncan is portrayed as a king/president seeking re-election. The nurses all wear political campaign buttons with his picture on them when he comes to pin a Thane of Cawdor medal on Macbeth.

Macduff is played as an anti-war draft dodger, who was not around to protect his wife and children when they needed him. Once he returns to fulfill the famous prophecy to Beware Macduff,  he and Macbeth have one of the most prolonged and exciting physical fight scenes imaginable,  as befits a trained soldier coming up against a determined but inexperienced adversary.

Handsome and highly masculine in his combat fatigues, McKinley Belcher III  is by turns forceful, manic, frightened, and enraged as Macbeth, while Shirine Babb who plays both his wife and one of the three nurse/witches is a suitable mate. Socorro Santiago and Jackie Chung are equally effective as the other two nurses.

George Kulp is the glad-handing Duncan, and Barret O’Brien’s bandages as Banquo turn into a removable white ski-mask when he reappears as Macduff.

Mimi Lien’s beautifully realized set of a hospital ward is stunning in its detail, down to the copious amounts of blood being mopped up by stagehands in green scrubs. These are further aided by Tyler Micoleau’s lighting, Ryan Rumery’s sound design, Toni-Leslie James’ costumes and David Anquelo’s fight direction. I’m sure Shakespeare would have loved it all, and his penchant for metaphorical layers of meaning would have enabled him to understand what Ting is up to here.

Be aware that this is not a show for everyone. It works best if you are comfortably familiar with the original play so that you hear the lines and think “Oh, yes, of course” and also that you are politically aware and sensitive to the impact of PTSD. Apparently as the play was being put together, Ting invited various veterans groups as consultants, and they were very pleased to see the problem being presented.

If you have never seen or read Macbeth, a synopsis of the is included in the playbill, but there were definitely a few people in the audience who were a little confused. On the other hand, it is a noble intellectual and theatrical experiment, with a huge amount of talent on display. It’s just not what your ninth grade teacher had in mind.

(Performances continue only until February 12. See the Enjoy Calendar, in print and online, for performance and ticket details.)