Hilton Als' New Yorker review of the show:
After checking in at the box office, where audience members are given a playing card, and leaving coats, sweaters, and bags in a coatroom that lines the dimly lit entrance hall, you climb a flight of stairs that leads to a black, curtained space. There’s an opening in the curtain; you enter and, within moments, you’re shuffling through a maze. (The only light is projected onto the floor. But it’s not a path that inspires confidence, since you have already entered an environment that you don’t feel you can trust.) Will the curtains suffocate and swallow us up? Is there someone in the velvet darkness who will “get” us? Is there a trapdoor in the floor? We can’t hold on to the music as any kind of comfort. The score is loud, constant, a timpani-heavy beat combined with other abrasive sounds. (The dreadful, perfect soundtrack here and throughout the show is by Stephen Dobbie, whose work often sounds the way the protagonist’s agony reads in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.”) There is no one to help us. But then comes a measure of relief—if you can call it that. After we finally reach the other side of the maze, we find ourselves in a lounge, which consists of a small bandstand, a bar, tables, sofas, chairs. But the atmosphere is from another era, with a host from another era, dressed in a tuxedo, with black, slicked-back hair, and an unctuous, controlling manner (Conor Doyle in this performance; the cast varies). He welcomes us to Manderley.
Like our host, the smoky, damask-heavy atmosphere comes straight out of the nineteen-thirties. (The brilliant set is by Barrett, Livi Vaughan, and Beatrice Minns. The equally noticeable costumes are by David Israel Reynoso.) Or are we in the nineteen-thirties? Was our journey through the black velvet actually some kind of time travel? Doyle speaks in a plummy old-English-movie accent; he could well be the star of the sort of movie where bodies are found in the library and love and betrayal are expressed over a perfectly appointed dinner table. He directs us to the bar to purchase a drink, also telling us that, in short order, the cards we’ve been carrying will be called. You might be dreaming as you order a drink. You might be a dream yourself. Before you can settle in with your cocktail, though, your card is announced, and you move on to the next sequence of events, which forms the core of the performance. Standing in a dark vestibule in front of a lift, you’re given a mask to wear, which brings to mind both the murderer in the “Scream” series and the party guests in Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut.” A beautiful black woman (Teena Blain) with long black hair, dressed in an evening gown and speaking with an exaggerated accent—every other word she utters, it seems, is “darling”; sometimes it sounds like a threat—tells us not to say a word; language would upset the other guests, or inmates. She implores us to hurry back if we must; she’ll be lonely without us. She’s lonely for the young man (John Sorensen-Jolink) who crowds us into a freight elevator, too. The chiaroscuro lighting in the lift only adds to the sense of dread and foreboding as he cautions us never to remove our masks, and assures us that if we get confused while on any of the hotel’s five floors that are open to us there are sentries in black who can help us. The elevator stops. We’re discharged. There’s the creak and whir of the lift descending. Then silence.
Doors. Rooms filled with desks, old papers, stuffed animals, all dimly lit. We’re on the verge of horror. But where is it? In our very imaginations? One of the rooms contains a number of beds with iron frames; clipboards with the inmates’ psychological histories are attached. But where are the nurses, the doctors, who are meant to see these absent patients through their disease of the mind? Is the sight of a room filled with bathtubs, of a man washing garments in one and then placing them on another tub to dry, any more real than the vision we will soon have of characters based on Macbeth and Lady Macbeth (Eric Jackson Bradley and Tori Sparks) engaged in a silent physical exchange—a battle that looks sexual because it is—before he helps her dress and apply her lipstick for their shared battle of deceit and tragedy? Sparks has close-cropped hair and a square torso, while Jackson Bradley is long and lean, almost slight; he is at a mental disadvantage because she has the physical power. To see the various characters without masks—or wearing their characters’ face—makes our masked faces look and feel more theatrical and fake than the performers’. Walking from level to level, the audience catches sight of other performers. A pregnant woman reaches for and then shuns the milk she’s being offered. She’s Lady Macduff. Turning a corner, we see Banquo. Again, the performers’ movements—at times delicate and slow, like the tenderest of mimes; at other times fast and agitated—help bring out the tension that exists here between theatrical plasticity (the play’s various actions) and pictorial stasis (its remarkable set). Indeed, the music further confuses us as it insinuates itself throughout this self-consciously “beautiful” work, which teeters on the edge of making us sick—by inducing a kind of emotional vertigo—before hiding behind its captivating, hard finish. The music belongs less to the dancers than to their backdrop. It wafts over, and settles into, the action, which feels as sour and inexplicable as those bouts of insomnia when the world is stale and we can hear the blood coursing through our bad thoughts.
Of course, sleep and blood are the central metaphors of disturbance in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” but I didn’t feel that the Bard was the central dramaturgical impulse here. I felt, as I walked to various levels in the cavernous space, and travelled through a moth-eaten Highlands hotel and alongside the stunted ramparts of a castle and among clumps of Christmas trees, or followed a distraught young woman whose costuming and attitude reminded me of the gesture-filled, lyrical, and cinematic self-exposure featured in the late Francesca Woodman’s photographs, that Barrett and Doyle’s primary impulse was to make theatre matter, to have an over-all emotional effect, in which décor and dance are equal to the dramaturgy, as in eighteenth-century operas.
Because language is abandoned outside the lounge, we’re forced to imagine it, or to make narrative cohesion of events that are unfolding right before our eyes—or on the floor below, without us. We cannot connect with the characters through the thing that we share: language. We can only watch as the performers reduce theatre to its rudiments: bodies moving in space. As such, large chunks of the work belong to the world of dance, and ideas about repetition: the performers “act” their parts over and over in a three-hour time frame. Stripped of what we usually expect of a theatrical performance, we’re drawn more and more to the panic that the piece incites, and the anxiety that keeps us moving from floor to floor and from room to room, like shuddering inmates. This spell is, unfortunately, broken if you return to the lounge to quiet down and gain perspective. The images that one has instilled with fright start to recede as the jazz combo and the singer take the stage, and the beautiful black woman walks and slowly dances among the assembled guests, who are perhaps contemplating the next round of cloak-and-dagger with their own souls. Does this mean that, if one forgets moments of the piece in this doomed party atmosphere, it’s superficial? Yes. Does this mean that the profound role the piece plays in altering one’s consciousness makes it a deep work, too? Yes. ♦
