“You gon’ rework a 400-year-old play just for your ego?” asks one of three witches in the new show “Macbeth in Stride.” Whitney White, who stars as Lady Macbeth in this quasi-feminist concert reimagining of Shakespeare’s Scottish Play, smugly responds: “Yup. Sure did! Sure did!”
I don’t fault “Macbeth in Stride,” which opened last Tuesday at BAM’s Harvey Theater, for its ego. We can always use work exploring what it means for a woman to proudly assert herself, to show her agency, to dare to grasp at power in spaces where she is meant to be secondary to a man. In this show, the artist invites us to see her through the role of Lady Macbeth, breaking the fourth wall to bring us into her process of recreating a character from one of the most frequently produced and remade works of English literature. But “Macbeth in Stride” is more ego than execution, more gestures than statements. And White’s heroine is much less substantial than the very character she’s critiquing and reworking in her own image.
White, who wrote and performs this piece, is one of the city’s essential director-performers and is having an extended moment on New York stages this spring. Throughout her career she has focused on directing works by and about women and Black artists, including Bess Wohl, James Ijames and Aleshea Harris.
In this work, White is centered as a kind-of Lady Macbeth (she’s just called “Woman” in the script) who’s a glam queen, a lead singer in a black bodysuit. She’s on a concert stage with a live band (the effortlessly talented Bobby Etienne on bass; Barbara Duncan, a.k.a. Muzikaldunk, on drums; and Kenny Rosario-Pugh on guitar), and those three witches (played by Phoenix Best, Holli’ Conway and Ciara Alyse Harris) are her backup singers and commentators.
The main medium here is song, and “Macbeth in Stride” is an almost perilously eclectic mix of genres. The first song, “If Knowledge Is Power,” features the show’s music director and conductor, Nygel D. Robinson, on piano singing with glossy John Legend-style vocals. The melody suggests something lush and romantic, like a nocturne, but when the witches join in, they evoke the TLC days of 1990s R&B, with matching dance moves courtesy of Raja Feather Kelly.
From there the score abruptly shifts between classic rock, soul and gospel. It is exciting for its unpredictability but is borderline incoherent. The lyrics land as either too trivial or too glib (“Who’s the man?” / “I’m the man.” / “Yes you are” sing the Macbeths to each other, not facetiously enough). The vocal talents of the witchy trio are impressive, almost overshadowing White’s, but White holds her own in the featured role. Charlie Thurston, as the “Man” who plays this show’s Macbeth, however, has much less to offer in range, timbre and presence.
The set, with its visible scaffolding and runway-style elevated walkways and platforms, creates the appearance of a stadium concert stage. (Scenic design is by Dan Soule.) Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew’s vibrant, ever-shifting lighting helps provide structure to the show’s movements, which otherwise bleed together. And with the exception of Lady Macbeth’s lustrous gold floor-length coat and opulent crown, the costume design, by Qween Jean, is as muddled as much of the show’s other elements; Lady Macbeth’s disco diva look is distractingly at odds with Macbeth’s edgy leather-wearing style and the witches’ knot-and-fringe ensembles.
Part of “Macbeth in Stride” seems to imagine itself a kind of close read of the material through a contemporary lens, but the show uncomfortably shuttles in and out of Shakespeare’s scenes and dialogue. The result is that Shakespeare’s lines are lifeless while the modern plainspeak feels false.
And as for the read of the material, there’s not much novelty to the show’s analysis of Lady Macbeth. Which is a letdown — for all of White’s cosplaying as a more self-aware metatextual version of the doomed queen, this Lady Macbeth is all style and little substance.
But what’s most disappointing is that the show doesn’t do more than superficially call out the artist’s lens as a Black woman, a modern woman, a theatermaker. The Woman introduces “Macbeth” as the play that “kicked it all off,” got her through tough times and framed her thinking of herself, but the script doesn’t commit to unpacking the personal dimension of this character. “What happens when a Black woman’s only way up is by violent means?” the Woman asks at some point. I’d certainly like to know.
By the end of the show we’re left with no upshot other than a general affirmation of girl power. So “Macbeth in Stride” feels like a work still very much in progress, a project still squaring itself with its intentions. “Rebuilding the system is hard and so is reworking a play,” says one witch. “Don’t know if we will ever be able to do it.” As the production currently stands, her concerns are well-founded.
Macbeth in Stride
Through April 27 at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music; bam.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
Maya Phillips is an arts and culture critic for The Times.
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