Friday Night in Harlem: Pulse Ensemble Theatre presents "Macbeth" at Riverbank State Park

Tonight we were at Riverbank State Park in Harlem to see an extraordinarily innovative and entertaining Macbeth, set in Afghanistan and directed by Alexa Kelly, a presentation of the company's sixth annual Pulse Ensemble Theatre’s Harlem Summer Shakespeare program and a featured part of Harlem Week.

This is the Pulse Ensemble Theatre's twentieth anniversary, and the company did a spectactular job in putting this production together, first as a site-specific performance on Governor's Island (the professional-looking photos here are publicity stills from that; the blurry cellphone pics are our own), and now at the beautiful amphitheater on the Hudson River.

It was a cool August evening that turned into a gorgeous night under the crescent Ramadan moon and the occasional droning of airplanes above, which, along with the resonant sound effects such as bombs falling and the muezzin's call for prayer, made the Afghan war setting come alive.

Despite working nearby in the Hamilton Heights section of Harlem at City College, we'd never before been to Riverbank State Park.

It's hard to believe that this beautiful park with incredible facilities is built on top of a massive sewage treatment plant, but then so is Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane.

We arrived early, with only a few people coming before us.

Tonight was actually the second preview, and the Harlem Macbeth officially opens tomorrow night and will be playing Wednesday-Sunday for the next couple of weekends before ending on Saturday, August 28.

Director Alexa Kelly's setting Macbeth in Afghanistan, with the Macbeths and others serving in the military and wearing camouflauge outfits most of the time, and with King Duncan, his sons, and others (the scary masked murderers Macbeth enlists seem to be Taliban) in traditional Afghan dress, and with the witches in weird-sister burqas, was a stroke of genius.

It highlights, for one thing, some of the crucial issues of the play and of wars in countries like Afghanistan: the contrasts between autocratic but wise kingship as represented by Duncan and tyranny and anarchy of equally autocratic "strongmen"; the relationship of wanton cruelty (although many of the killings are offstage, there's blood everywhere here) and the manly military ethic (not limited by gender, since Lady Macbeth, Lady Macduff, Angus, Mentieth and others are female warriors; and the legitimacy of governance in a state overshadowed by perpetual war.

The sound system and body mics had a few glitches but they didn't detract from the action; Adam Jonas Segaller, giving a fine performance as the stolid Banquo, discarded his screeching mic at one point and was perfectly clear without amplifaction. The lighting, the wonderful costumes, and the use of the semicircular space in front of the stage to convey the hectic chaos of war as troops, terrorists and hysterical civilians ran back and forth, were all very effective.

Making the witches Afghan war widows, possibly won over to the terrorist side (which is what, we're never sure, since the line between the "sides" seems fluid, as it is in the real Afghanistan), but definitely out for revenge. Their chants sometimes take on the lilting cadence of liturgical prayer, and they have supernatural powers. Wendy Snow, Erica Chamblee and Regina Gibson offer up spectacular performances with their bodies - they whirl like Sufi dervishes at one heart-stopping point in the action - as well as their voices.

The mostly Equity cast was superb. As the American troops/Scottish nobles, Kara Addington, Mia Anderson, Mathew J, Harris and Shawn Williams are subtle and believable; they seem to be everywhere and always more restive than they let on.

Jeff Burchfield as Duncan is a wise and tolerant ruler, a bit too trusting and easy to fool; we'd be lucky to have him instead of Hamid Karzai, but in a country like his, an Afghan Duncan probably would meet the same fate as Shakespeare's does, done in by treacherous subordinates.

As his sons, Akeem Folkes in his brief appearance presents an understandably frightened Donalbain, and Paul Pontrelli as Malcolm gives an electric performance as medieval terror turns him from a sweet, slightly effeminate boy into a forceful and dynamic leader who's both unsentimental (in his stirring speech to Macduff) and compassionate (at the death in battle of his uncle's son).

Danny Makali’I Mittermeyer's Macduff is a gruff professional soldier who can compartmentalize his life in a way that other warlords in the play cannot, yet he evinces an integrity that would lead him today be a whistleblower of atrocities on his own side. Like Banquo, he has ambition but the moral sense (and maybe even common sense) that the power couple the Macbeths are lacking.

As Lady Macduff, Leigh Ellen Caudill (along with her blanket-swathed infant son) is a terrified victim of one of the play's numerous violent atrocities; we feel her helplessness, and as Hecate behind her black burqa and mask, she whips up the witches into a (religious?) frenzy of cruel retribution. Gregory Wool makes Fleance a playful, boyish fellow soldier to his father, Banquo (as we said, Adam Jonas Segaller was very strong in that role, and he also made a reproachful silent ghost); when he disappears, you wonder if his just-in-time escape from assassination along with Banquo will leave him with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Of course, the success of the Scottish play turns on the actors playing the leads, and here Brian Richardson as Macbeth and Reneé Flemings are spellbinding. American military couples are not that unique today, and so their partnership in ambition and the savagery that is its result seems natural, especially when their intense sexual bond is so evident.

Ultimately it's clear that they're both suffering from PTSD, fueling their hallucinations and obsessions and instinctive use of violence to solve every problem. Their trauma manifests itself in different ways, and here it's clear that Lady Macbeth probably understands that even in an environment of nominal sexual equality, it's simply her gender that's prevented her from reaching the leadership position her husband has from the play's beginning. Richardson's mellifluous Caribbean accent seems to inform his chafing in the role of a honored but subordinate noble, and when he, like Flemings, becomes undone and more than a little hysterical, it's all the more poignant for their only somewhat successful efforts to reign in their demons.

Both Richardson and Flemings give line readings to their dialogue and monologues that suggests they're somewhat distracted by inner torments that they cannot quite get their fingers on. Their scenes together work perfectly, their machinations seemingly just a deadly extension of mutually self-destructive patterns that have played out during their entire marriage and the interminable war.

Director Kelly and the actors seem to us to have gotten to the core of the tragedy of the Macbeths and that of the chaos that is the real king of their country. Just as it's hard to determine exactly what's gone on in Afghanistan and what lies ahead for that graveyard of empires, it's hard to believe that it will end with the neat hopes of the victorious Macduff and the new king Malcolm have at the end of Macbeth.

The Pulse Ensemble Theatre's production seems a worthy successor to Orson Welles's legendary 1936 Harlem "voodoo Macbeth" set in Haiti. We're really grateful to have had the chance to see it.

Sunday Night on the Upper West Side: Hudson Warehouse presents "Romeo and Juliet" at the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument

This evening we were back at the Sailors' and Soldiers' Monument at West 89th Street and Riverside Drive to see yet another intelligent and accomplished production from Hudson Warehouse, a Romeo and Juliet set within the current (and ancient) conflict in Afghanistan, directed by the endlessly inventive Nicholas Martin-Smith.

By placing the conflict between the Montagues and Capulets in a war-torn realm in which long-standing blood feuds between clans and ethnic groups hold sway, this Romeo and Juliet, in the director's words, allows the work "to dig deep into the savagery of these two families."

Here, the Montagues are the American military. Romeo, his commanding officer Montague, and Friar Lawrence and the rest of Romeo's companions, are dressed in soliderly camoflage, dogtags, and combat boots.

The Capulets, meanwhile, are dressed in traditional Afghan attire: for the men, variously, stylized versions of the cape, caftan, salwar kameez, turban, keffiyeh and Karakul black lamb hat; for the women - Juliet, her mother Lady Capulet, and the Nurse, in public this means a version of the burqa, while in the sanctuary of their home, in Juliet's case a long, flowing dress - and a lot less, once she and Romeo are intimate.

The culture clash between the Montagues and Capulets is highlighted by other differences, and it's always clear that we're in a war zone in a place of endless war.

This is the first Shakespeare in the park production where we noticed the actors ever acknowledge the air traffic overhead; when one of the helicopters that occasionally fly over Riverside Park during performances whirred overhead, Romeo at one point looked up, suggesting that in this military conflict, this noisy intrusion is both routine and threatening.

Mercutio, the most transgressive character in the drama, is an American who's gone native a bit. Played with gusto by Tyler D. Hall, who was so good in last season's Hamlet and last month's Cyrano, the wildly erratic Mercutio remains shirtless beneath a Middle Eastern cape, wearing red-lensed sunglasses. He's disgusted with the conflict, and you get the feeling he would prefer to be anywhere else - surfing in southern California, say, or at a downtown club - and both his fanciful, almost psychedelic Queen Mab speech, and upon his fatal injury at the blade of Tybalt, his repeated "plague on both your houses" seem informed by weariness of unending war.

Of course Romeo and Juliet also transgress. Their love-at-first-sight meeting at the Capulet ball and the forbidden nature of their mutual attraction and acting on it seems more dangerous because of the setting; the stakes are higher in this fierce and fiery land.

The constant violent deaths give context to the killings of Mercutio and Tybalt; when the Capulets come running and beat their breasts in anguish at the death of their nephew Tybalt (played by a fiery, fanatical Gustavo Obregon, someone you can easily envision as a suicide bomber), it echoes countless photos we've seen of Middle Eastern family members so publicly mourning violent, senseless deaths of their young ones. Yet even where cycles of violent retribution seem to prevail, romantic passions - and genuine love - can bloom in unlikely places.

The narration of the play, both the prologue and epilogue, standing on the periphery, is Friar John (Drew Rosene, who also was the genius costume designer), whose usual small part as Friar Lawrence's messenger here is expanded, and Friar John seems to be the only person who represents the outside world; he looks like a foreign correspondent, flown in from London or Paris, trying to make sense of the madness he's observing.

The Prince here, played to a saturnine fare-thee-well by Jesse Michael Mothershed, seems to be a Western-installed military governor. He wears a suit and tie, or when interrupted at leisure, a polo shirt and casual-Friday slacks. He speaks with annoyance at having been brought in from a more civilized place to preside among such barbarians.

And both sides seem barbaric. The usually gentle Friar Lawrence is played in a brilliant turn by Friar Lawrence is a military man, with the mid-South drawl of a Marine drill sergeant; he and Hamlet typically exchange salutes, and if he's a man of God, it's as a Southern Baptist no-nonsense military chaplain. It was a terrific performance.

The apparent commanding officer of the soldiers' unit, Lord Montague (Vince Philip), is gruff and distracted, and the ground troops - Nike DeVita as Benvolio (with a black death's-head heavy metal t-shirt) and J.T. Maloy as Balthasar (Special Forces?) - are Midwestern or Southern Americans who look like they've given up on ever getting out of this bloody madhouse and act accordingly.

Valerie O'Hara, who was so good last weekend as Roxane's duenna Marguerite in Cyrano, plays a similar role here, as Juliet's Nurse. But her performance in Romeo and Juliet is much different: the Nurse, though she may complain a lot and act the fool, seems to be both wise and aware of her own genuine competence. Even when veiled, she's an open book.

Hudson Warehouse mainstay David Palmer Brown, a gifted actor whom we enjoyed so much last weekend as DeGuiche in Cyrano and last summer as Polonius in Hamlet, excels as a Lord Capulet with a medieval mindset; we got the feeling he'd hardly hesitate to kill his own daughter for the sake of family honor.

Amanda Renee Baker, as his wife, seemed very much a woman of her faith and region, alternately mournful and commanding.

There was so much about this production to admire. It began raining during the scene in which Juliet is notified of Tybalt's slaying and Romeo's banishment, and a number of people started leaving as they got wetter. But mercifully, the rain stopped just like that after a few minutes, and we felt lucky to be able to move up (down, actually, on the steps) for a better seat.

As the two lovers, Amanda Ochoa and George K. Wells were moving and utterly believable. They're both baby-faced enough to convey the innocence of adolescent passion and its impulsive nature.

There's a genuine sweetness to their moments together. Romeo drops the facade he sometimes wears among his fellow soldiers - he's a nervous smoker - and Juliet, her veil removed, reveals a deep generosity in her love.

Romeo's fatal fight at Juliet's tomb with Paris - Lorenzo Villanueva gives a subtle performance as a boyish count who feels he has to adopt the role of a future warlord - dreadfully compounds the awfulness here, and Romeo knows it. Juliet's suicide, and Romeo's, came very close to being averted, but Peter (Jerry Mouse Nwosuocha) and Balthasar (J.T. Maclay) dither on their respective sides: in this impulsively vicious land, it's probably functional to delay in most cases but of course here it's fatal.

At the end, Montague and Capulet, chastened by the deaths of their young, raise their arms to signal an end to the senseless violence. But even as the Prince proclaims that the tragedy has weirdly led to the accomplishment of his mission to pacify Verona, it is hard not to have lingering doubts that peace is at hand.

This was a remarkably timely and brilliant production by director Nicholas Martin-Smith, the Hudson Warehouse cast and crew, and the play continues over the next three weekends in August.