It takes great cahones to play Macbeth: to begin a
Shakespearean play as the title character, strong and noble
and to end a blithering, blundering fool, slain and head
mounted on a spike. Andrew H. Leman did wonderfully. His
intonations were expressive, varied and he was majestically
complimented by McKerrin Kelly as Lady Macbeth. In her interpretation
of the role it became clear to me for the first time how brimmed
with sexual persuasiveness her character has been written with.
The words of Lady Macbeth have always seemed convincing enough,
but in Kelly’s delivery, i grasped how manipulative she could be using
her feminine guile.

The special effects were just plain great. For Geoff
Hoff at the LA Theatre Review, who clearly expected a
multimillion dollar production and who says of the three
apparitions, “One looked like nothing but an aborted fetus”,
that’s what is was meant to be, dude. The set designers truly
maximized the space, using good lighting techniques which
illuminated the face of kings behind the Stonehenge-like
pillars when I least expected a new use of the stage space to occur.

It never hurts to read a play before going to see it, but in
case your Shakespeare is rusty, Theatre Banshee has cleverly
anticipated needing to hold your hand and provided a scene by
scene synopsis at the door. They also took care in the
programs to explain their unusual choices: to use an
Aboriginal didgeridoo during scene changes, to use a set that
resembles Stonehenge. Good work, guys.

I wish I’d been sitting in the front row. The reasons, for
brevity’s sake, I’ve listed below:

* Because in the opening sword fight breaking though the smoke
machine’s mist, I’d have been right in the thick of it.
* Because then I would have been perfectly positioned to thump
the loud and innappropriate Loud Laugher in the front row who
let out a hearty chuckle at nothing in particular, periodically.
* Because I wouldn’t have had to have been subjected to the
elemental torture of sitting directly under a fan (with wet
hair, since i left the house in a hurry).

Therein lies my strongest criticism of the production, which
for someone as critical as me, is really saying something. The
theatre is small, and has two powerful fans over the heads of
the audience. I understand these are necessary for temperature
regulation, moving the smoke machine mist out of the way, etc.
But hey, I shivered under 3 coats.

I love this play, I loved this production. Go see this play.
You won’t regret it, just sit in the front rows.

Theatre Banshee is located at 3435 W. Magnolia in Burbank, CA
91505 and this play is running until April 26th with performances Fridays
at 8pm, Saturdays at 8pm and Sundays at 2pm.

Ticket prices: $20.00, $15 for Students/Seniors. Goldstar
members can also get discounted tickets.

Reservations can be made online at www.theatrebanshee.org or
by phone on (818) 846-5323.

It’s a square straight out of a Star Wars city: clouds, large marble pillars, expansive and sweeping staircases, and lots and lots of sunlight.

This Korean woman wearing an enourmous serving tray over he shoulders carrying every kind of hanging antique in the universe waddled up to me. She was something out of Howl’s Moving Castle or the Fifth Element. And she was trying to pawn off a tea set on me. Thing about the teapot she was shaking at me was that it’s the one I’ve been looking for forever…It’s a Japanese design that features a dragon on a black background. The special thing about these tea sets is that back in the day, they used to create these designs on the base of the cups that could only be seen if you held them up to the light. (Weird, but true, so no extra points.)

There was a door to one of the buildings: Big glass doors with metal handles and signs on either side that read “Push” or “Pull” in clean Helvetica. The door which was a Time Door. Everyone walking in and out of it was a mirage-like hologram of people in the past. Like a sci-fi echo of time, the door was capturing echoes of people walking through doors through the ages. Some were hurrying and then would fade into a mist 3 feet from the exit. Others would keep walking, talking to their invisible friends who were not echoing in this place.They’d be doing the normal act of walking through a glass door, only they couldn’t see anyone around them from any other time period than their own. For example, one of the many people I saw walk right past me was my father. It must have been the 70s for him because he had a funky handlebar moustache and he looked like he’d been out all night partying with friends. Of course, he didn’t see me, and if he had, he wouldn’t have know who I was because I knew that he hadn’t even met my mother yet.

The worst (and best) part about the dream, was that my friend Stephanie came to see me there. She was there with her husband in some Quantum Leap kind of world where they had come to see me and to attend some sort of reunion on this temporal plane, but having attended, they had to go back to their own time (the present, which unfortunately meant they had to zap back over to Texas). She ran up to me and gave me a quick hug and then ran into a building, where her husband was waiting in a room where there were like 5 or 6 men in uniform and a mattress on the floor. They both lay on a mattress and these “Time Assistants” lifted the mattress up to a wall. I thought they were going to get hurt so i pulled the mattress away from the wall again, but they had disappeared. Almost. I could still see the indent in the mattress where they were lying and watching as the last traces of their outlines disappeared, until there was nothing left but the mattress itself. (Multiple points for Weirdness.)

Then my alarm went off.

And that is why I should never eat Indian food before bedtime.

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