'Macbeth' for a mercantile age

BETHLEHEM, Pa. - The irresistibly gothic side of Shakespeare's Macbeth arrived in stark, stylish form in Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival's newly minted production, occupying a Germanic industrial chic netherworld with fuzz-box guitar for sonic atmosphere, and excellent actors who made sure the external packaging never existed for its own sake.

Director Patrick Mulcahy and designer Bob Phillips walked a line between expressionism and abstraction with a clean, open stage and series of panels suggesting chain-link fence as designed by Versace that could double as forests, as well as a curtain separating the temporal from the supernatural.

Here, the witches are unmistakably in charge. Hardly confined to their two big scenes, the women playing the witches also play minor characters, as if they're temporarily possessing the people around Macbeth, pushing him to murder his way to the Scottish throne, and donning large, round sunglasses when assuming their weird-sister personas, ever reminding you they see a world that we do not.

Besides adding a certain unity that made Shakespeare's most streamlined play seem even more compact, the approach addressed concerns that might dog Macbeth in our mercantile era. One could stand back and ask, "What good is power over murky medieval Scotland when there's not even a year-end bonus?" The answer: Ambition is irrational and the dark forces represented by the witches are as good an explanation as any. Here, they don't report the future so much as create chaos that, ironically, restores the right dynasty to power with a greater sense of its place in the world.

In the title role, Ian Bedford had all of the right equipment - a warrior's stature and authority - but at Saturday's opening, didn't encompass the psychological extremes in the course of Macbeth's extra-worldly saga. Susan Riley Stevens easily filled Lady Macbeth's shoes, showing her character being stripped of her many cultivated inner defenses, her sleepwalking scene conveying such a complete implosion that news of her death felt redundant. And as the Macbeths deteriorated, Perry Ojeda's charismatic Macduff came to carry the production, framed by an ensemble with a good command of the Shakespearean language.

A word for those who have never visited the premises: The DeSales University campus in the rural outskirts of Bethlehem does indeed feel like a festival, with a well-equipped, perfectly scaled theater and an outdoor plaza that, on Saturday, accommodated a preperformance concert of Shakespeare-era music. So it is worth the drive.

Macbeth

Through Aug. 3 at the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, DeSales University, 2755 Station Ave., Center Valley, Pa.

Tickets: $25-$50.

Information: 610-282-9455, www.pashakespeare.org

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