This past Saturday my pal Dave invited me to join him for my favorite play, Shakespeare's dreaded ["Scottish Play"]. I've acted in it twice, and seen many productions of it over the years, from scrappy regional theatre versions to a Broadway-bound tour with Christopher Plummer and Glenda Jackson at the Mechanic Theatre in Baltimore in 1988 (Cherry Jones played Lady MacDuff in that production, though I didn't know who she was then).
But I never saw a ["Scottish Play"] quite like the one Dave and I saw Saturday, at Spotlight Youth Theatre...
It's ["The Scottish Play"] performed by teenagers, so it's safe to say that it's uneven. The vaguely 20th-Century dress works well enough, although the use of guns instead of swords in the battle scenes is a poor choice. But overall the direction, by Jack Taylor, is straightforward and coherent; most admirably, Taylor resists the temptation, so common in modern productions, to overuse the Witches (though they're excellent).
In any case, for me, at some level, it seems like this show's dark, awful power always takes hold in the end. It's the all-time greatest dramatization of the terrifying truth that some wrongs can't be made right, and placing the weight of such crimes on the shoulders of performers this young and callow somehow adds to the horror.
The cast is full of spirited players, but the standout is Wardeh Hanna as Lady M. It wouldn't astound me to see her in, say, ten years, accepting an Emmy or something.
The show runs through Sunday, April 23.
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