Skip to main content
Clanging swords, a bellowing ghost, gleaming blood. As directed by Asae Dean, Salt and Sage’s production of Macbeth is sobering, with its vicious battles and high body counts, but it’s also wicked fun.
For one thing, Macbeth (a hypnotic Bobby Bermea) and his wife (a ferocious Allison Anderson) clearly have the hots for each other. Even when they’re plotting murder, they engage in a lot of squeezing, grabbing and stroking.
Their frank sexuality emphasizes the pleasures of Shakespeare’s dark 400-year-old tale, which begins with a prediction. Three witches, or “weird sisters,” as they’re also called, tell Macbeth, an honorable enough general, that he will be king of Scotland. The prophecy awakens the hunger for power in both Macbeth and his wife, who hounds her vacillating husband until he resolves to kill the current king.
The witches have always been a highlight of the play, stirring a newt’s eye and frog’s toe into a potion and repeating the deliciously familiar incantation, “Double, double, toil and trouble; fire burn and cauldron bubble.” Although Shakespeare gave them just a handful of scenes, in Dean’s production, we get to see more of the three sisters (played to eerie perfection by Laura Bouxsein, Carissa Chu and R. David Wyllie), who are often lurking in the background even when they have no lines. Whether they’re on the stage or on the stairs and platforms of the metal scaffolding that ingeniously serves as a set, the trio, dressed in long, body-hugging knits, slink and ooze like modern dancers performing under water.
Movement speaks as loudly as words throughout the production. Both Macbeth and his lady kneel at times, suggesting they’re praying to an evil deity, and Dean has staged some spellbinding pantomimes accompanied by cello, banjo, and drum to reveal the underbelly of the story. When King Duncan (played by Wyllie, who seamlessly transitions from playing a weird sister) arrives with his entourage at Macbeth’s castle, the entire party stands in a circle as they raise their glasses and embrace, bringing home the horror of a host and hostess plotting the demise of their honored guest. And in another wordless scene, Lady Macbeth frantically rearranges the gleaming silverware laid out for a banquet as a musician (Elliot Lorenc) plays the banjo, echoing the jangling nerves brought on by her growing conscience.
The scarred metal scaffolding adds a music of its own as it audibly shifts and trembles whenever the actors move up and down its stairs. When the blue-lit ghost of Macbeth’s murdered friend Banquo (Peter Schuyler) appears on the platform, he releases a storm of sound by vigorously rattling the upper railing, and as Macbeth debates whether to kill Duncan, we hear the creak of his wife’s footsteps above, symbolizing her influence over him.
There’s one scene before the final battles where more movement—or sound or lights, which are used so effectively elsewhere—might have been useful. The dialogue between Duncan’s son Malcolm (Lorenc) and the general Macduff (brought to powerful life by Paul Susi) is a pivotal scene, but it’s also talky, making it easy to miss that Malcolm is actually testing Macduff’s loyalty, a fact that adds drama to the lengthy exchange.
Throughout the production, though, the entire cast is sublime. The intimate theater space brings them just feet from the audience, and Bermea, whose delivery is so natural you almost forget he’s acting, isn’t afraid to look intensely into the eyes of individual audience members as he speaks his iconic lines.
Salt and Stage says its mission is to “foreground the female experience,” which we see when Bouxsein, as a witch, begins the play by singing. Her lyrics are not from Shakespeare but pop songs and include lines like “Watch me make them bow” from Billie Eilish’s “You Should See Me in a Crown” and “I am no mother, I am no bride, I am king” from Florence and the Machine’s “King.”
After all the battles between the men have been fought, the lights go out and Bouxsein sings “I am no mother…” again, a creative decision that raises questions about gender. Is Lady Macbeth purely evil or is she an ambitious woman tired of being stuck behind the scenes? Either way, this production, like a gritty Halloween party, lets us all briefly dance with the devil without fear of consequences.
SEE IT: Macbeth plays at Shaking the Tree Theatre, 823 SE Grant St., saltandsagepdx.com. 7:30 pm Friday-Saturday, Through Aug. 26. $15. Masks required.