ALAMEDA HIGH SCHOOL GRAD ON THE SHOTGUN PLAYER STAGE
MACBETH
Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle
The Shotgun Players of Berkeley are currently performing William Shakespeare's MACBETH.
Until now, MACBETH has always been known as Shakespeare's bloodiest tragedy: it seems that everyone excepting the director, the stage manager and the man on lights dies.
There are so few survivors that the play is written without an epilog.
Given the casting and directing by Mark Jackson, the play is now amongst the sexiest.
Move over ANTHONY AND CLEOPATRA: you are about to be upstaged by one searing Lady Macbeth.
Blythe Foster plays a very calculating, sultry and steamy Lady Macbeth who mixes up her regicide with such ample doses of eroticism that she could send Polanski's MACBETH back to Poland.
If you thought Shakespeare was dull and priggishly Elizabethan, Miss Foster will certainly alter your perceptions about the politically ambitious.
When Ms Foster delivers the "unsex me here" speech, she achieves quite the opposite effect.
If Stoppard's SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE has any historical accuracy, the bard would strongly approve of Foster's Lady Macbeth.
Craig Marker gives a remarkable performance as Macbeth.
Superlative directing and acting is evidenced in MR Marker's brilliant transition from the halting, reluctant, insecure knight: the Thane of Cawdor, who is goaded and chided by Lady Macbeth, to a bold, arrogant butcher who is fueled by his own hubris, defiance of fate and mounting desperation.
As any school boy or girl knows, many Shakespearean clichés originate in Macbeth.
Unlike many actors and much to his credit, MR Marker speaks the "to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow" soliloquy without sounding like he is merely reciting it.
It seems that one cannot attend a live performance in the bay area these days without witnessing an Alameda resident "strutting and fretting his (or her) hour upon the stage."
This production includes Daniel Bruno who appropriately cast as the dutiful and eloquent: Ross.
MR Bruno, who graduated from Alameda High in 1990, was conspicuously groomed for the professional stage by Alameda's Frederick L. Chacon.
Few theater companies achieve such a meteoritic ascent so as to go from a rented, rusty, drafty warehouse to their own cozy, high-tech theater in so few years.
It is also worth noting that the Shotgun Theater is completely off-the-grid: they generate all their climate control and electrical energy via solar power.
Imagine: what is arguably the best and obviously the most provocative Shakespeare in the Bay Area leaving no carbon footprint.
If you like shockingly great theatre, zero emissions and our environment, get thee to the Shotgun Player's MACBETH.
The show closes February 2nd and is not to be missed.
For tickets, surf on over to www.shotgunplayers.org or call 510 841-6500.