Theater is good for examining our moral quandaries or offering a diversion from those troubles, said Guthrie Theater artistic director Joseph Haj.
“Macbeth,” which opened Feb. 5, offers a little of both.
Staged by Joe Dowling, the former artistic director who has returned to the $125 million riverfront edifice he reinvented, the Shakespearean tragedy functions like a window into a world turned upside down.
“Macbeth” reveals how thirst, overweening ambition and untreated mental illness combine to create cycles of bloodletting.
Dowling has set the story in a kind of perpetual, shadowy night. Its spare set, moody lighting and fog suggest eerie, foreboding horror. Think Bram Stoker’s “Macbeth.”
Costume-wise, the players flaunt couture and Black Panther chic. Assembled soldiers zip in and out in leather-like garb and black berets. That the tragedy jumps historic periods is immaterial. Nightmares are not neatly contained.
The production, which runs for an hour and 50 minutes without intermission — a long but absorbing sit — boasts visceral performances. Daniel José Molina, who distinguished himself as one of the monarchs in the Guthrie’s landmark History Plays, wears the cursed title crown.
At first, Molina’s Macbeth is kin to Hamlet — carrying the weight of the world, both men live more in their heads than in reality. And Macbeth has a habit of always talking to the departed shadow of the last person he interacted with, or looking away from those he’s in conversation with to focus his thoughts.
