Radio Macbeth
Radio Macbeth takes place late at night in the guts of an abandoned theater. Actors circle restlessly around the common shared warmth of a rehearsal table, moving through the bullet of Shakespeare’s briefest and perhaps most magnetic play. Around them, in the perimeter of the space, the ghosts of all previous productions hover and encroach. The spirits of ambition, violence, fortune, fate, free will, hubris, vengeance, pride, indecision, paradox, the eternal male-female conflict and madness flicker and glow. The actors cling to the sanity of words while the chaos of history grows to be undeniably present with them in the room.
“Will bring theater lovers to their knees.” —The New York Sun
Note about process:
Three years ago I directed SITI Company in our very first Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The production continues to tour and gain fans and momentum. The collision of Shakespeare’s highly poetic sensibilities and the classically trained actors of the Company make for the alchemy of galvanizing theater. We are embarking upon our next adventure with Shakespeare, this time by means of Macbeth. Following the formula of Radio Play, our staging of Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater on the Air’s War of the Worlds, we are approaching Radio Macbeth through a very special lens. —Anne Bogart
“Anne Bogart’s SITI Company captured that sound and fury better than many traditional productions of the Bard’s bloody drama. … Another signature SITI piece with timeless appeal …. kaleidoscopic spin as well as a propulsive power. … Full of passion, pride and terrible tragedy. …. Compelling minimalism, adroitly condensing an already-tight drama into an operatic ghost story. … Bogart’s company sheds new light—and reveals new levels of darkness—on a classic about the price of power-lust.” —The Columbus Dispatch
