Dozen Bodies Found

New Haveners, do not relax in the notion that 2012 might continue to be a year without homicides. By my count a dozen lacerated bodies have already been found over this weekend alone.

Fortunately all the wounds oozed stage blood. And the bodies rose from the dead and took graceful, well-deserved bows.

I’m referring, of course, to the current Long Wharf production of Macbeth (1969), Associate Director Eric Ting’s inventive adaptation of Shakespeare’s great 1606 tragedy.

The play runs one more week, through Feb. 12. It is well worth a visit, no New Haven police department escort required.

Most American tenth-graders, for whom the Tragedy of Macbeth is still deservedly required reading, are charged with figuring out mysteries such as: What possibly could have been Macbeth’s motivation suddenly to kill his boss and kinsman Duncan? Then why follow that with a paranoid cover-up that included the slaughter of even beautiful Lady MacDuff and her sweet little boy, among other innocents?

Frequent answers include: personal ​“oe’r leaping ambition” and the emasculating prodding of a homicidally social climbing wife.

But even for those of us writing our five-paragraph English class essays deep in the heart of the Vietnam War — or its agonized aftermath, for returning GIs— it never occurred that Macbeth and Banquo both may have been suffering from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Have all Macbeth’s horrific acts, his flashbacks, visions and insomnia derived from having ​“unseamed him [that is, his enemy] from the nave to the chops, and fixed his head upon our battlements”?

Ting’s Take

That idea animates Ting’s take, with results both insightful if not always fully convincing.

Into Mimi Lien’s beautifully designed antiseptic hospital ward set, with swinging doors and coldly oscillating lights, strides a physically powerful, muscled Macbeth.

Sturdily played by McKinley Belcher III, he hardly looks injured. His war buddy Banquo is in a wheelchair swathed in bandages covering all but his eyes and mouth. 

In this ward in 13 scenes without intermission the entire play is enacted: the killings, the tauntings, the visions that follow Macbeth being administered electro-shock.

The play seems to be saying: You call this therapy? Have you any idea what these young men are suffering from?

The setting is brilliant because you expect to see blood in a hospital ward, and there’s plenty of it. When Macbeth comes in with the crimson red daggers wrapped in a lumpy, blood-dappled white towel, you just know it’s not the aftermath of an appendectomy.

In his parrying with Lady Macbeth, sensually played by Shirine Babb, the daggers are returned to incriminate Duncan’s attendants. In the scuffle a hand print in blood is left on a post throughout the play, You are always looking at it, You cannot exorcize it, which is, of course, one of the symptoms of PTSD.

This is, after allm an adaptation, Ting takes considerable liberties in fusing scenes together out of the order in which they occur in the play. There are also speeches ripped out of one context and redeployed to another, Purists might have a problem.

When that works, it works well, as when in the beginning of the play Macbeth challenges Banquo to help fulfill the great kingly prophesies of the weird sisters. He tempts his friend by saying, in effect, act like a man, not a dog: ​“In the catalogue you go for men, as hounds and greyounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs, shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves are clept all by the name of dogs.”

That’s dialogue from two acts later in the original, when Macbeth hires murderers to kill, yes, Banquo. Here the concise transposition adds an irony that works to chilling effect.

Ting’s casting the weird sisters as nurses in a ward is not in itself an innovation; it’s been done before as have the updating of the medieval Scottish soldiers in Macbeth’s entourage.

The deep insight of his adaptation is to see the entire world of the play itself as in a way suffering from dramaturgical PTSD: the visions, the shaking up of the great chain of being with horses making strange noises at night, and stars misaligned; the sudden shifts, the terrible nightmares that everyone seems to be having.

Some critics even think that a scene may have been ripped from the play for political or other reasons, for Lady Macbeth’s transformation seems so sudden. Don’t we need another moment with the power couple to explain this?

Such traumatic breakdown is explicable through a PTSD lens; the play also suggests that the condition very much affects those traumatized soldiers coming home.

Macbeth critic A.C. Bradley has described Macbeth’s killing spree as being performed with ​“an appalling sense of duty.”

While the adaptation is thematically astute, it’s not always dramatically convincing. Why, for example, would Macbeth turn on Banquo? As I understand it, one’s wartime buddies are a refuge, not always utilized, yet not often a target of PTSD-caused rage. So the facts of the play — that is, Macbeth’s worry that future kings will derive not from his seed but from Banquo’s — are in places deeply at loggerheads with a PTSD lens.

Another unsolved problem: in the original text Macbeth seems to suffer not the classic PTSD flashback, but rather flash-forwards. Literary critics call it prolepsis, a habit of mind that makes a person see in advance events he is about to engage in. That leads to all kinds of hesitations, problems, and, of course, immortal soliloquies.

Double, Double Toil & Trouble

That said, what really carries the play is the omnipresence of the weird sisters. As nurses on the ward, they rarely are not smoking, gossiping, or listening to Jefferson Airplane tunes in their little office cubicle. They double and triple-role not only as themselves but as Lady Macbeth, the doctor and nurse, and all the lords of the court.

One sister, amusingly played with humor and a mincing walk by Jackie Chung, is even pregnant. Without as much as a change of cap, she’s later going to be Lady MacDuff; her unborn is the babe Macbeth’s henchmen also kill. In Ting’s production, it’s Macbeth himself who runs a bayonet through the womb, in one of the play’s most shocking moments of physical horror.

Audiences from the 17th century on have adored the weird sisters. Their supernatural persiflage, cooking with withcraft’s best ingredients, and eerie dance routines were such a hit, it’s likely that Thomas Middleton, not Shakespeare, added a whole new scene for them, inserting it at the beginning of the play’s third act long after the bard was dead.

Ting might be establishing a new tradition in viewing these 12th century Scottish soldiers’ lives through modern soldiers’ PTSD. Yet in utilizing the sisters to the hilt, as it were, Ting has honored and advanced an old tradition as well.

Also doing stalwart work in the small cast that brings to life a very big play are Barret O’Brien as Banquo and Macduff, George Kulp as a smooth-talking Duncanesque politician, and Socorro Santiago as the chain-smoking head nurse.