SALT LAKE CITY, Utah, April 16, 2024 (Gephardt Daily) — One scene. Nineteen lines. That is the extent of Lady Macduff’s appearance in “Macbeth.” But what if she had her say beyond that?
That’s the premise of Plan-B Theatre’s final play of the current season, “Bitter Lemon,” by Utah playwright Melissa Leilani Larson, a (sort of) world premiere. Creekside Theatre Festival in Cedar Hills, Utah, commissioned and produced a version of the show in 2019. That production involved a new cast each performance who’d never read the piece before, performing with scripts-in-hand, learning the show as the audience did. This is the fully realized production. The show opened Thursday, April 11, and runs through Sunday, April 28, in the Studio Theatre at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center in downtown Salt Lake City.
The piece is directed by artistic director Jerry Rapier, who has helmed more than 40 Plan-B productions.
It features Bobby Cody as Finlay Macbeth and Yolanda Stange as Helen Macduff.
Larson’s play tells the story of Finlay Macbeth, who has done Lady Helen Macduff a terrible wrong (just in case you’re wondering, in modern English, Macbeth’s first name in the Shakespeare play is Finlay. Neither Lady Macduff nor Lady Macbeth are given first names in the 1606 play.) Now they are trapped, alone together, in a purgatorial waiting room. Sometimes the only escape is forgiving the unforgivable. This riff on the Scottish play is a life-after-death journey through the strange, the empty, and everything in between.
Larson told Gephardt Daily in an interview last month that the character of Lady Macduff intrigues her; she appears in the original Shakespeare play so briefly, but is a commanding presence. She does not arrive onstage in “Macbeth” until Act 4, Scene 2, and in fact, that’s the only scene she is in. The scene ends with her and her son being murdered on Macbeth’s orders; those deaths come to represent the inability to maintain order and tradition in Shakespeare’s play when powerful individuals have chosen to rule through chaos.
Larson’s piece imagines a relationship between Lady Macduff and Macbeth, before the events in Shakespeare’s play. He finds himself in a room with her, and he doesn’t know why he is there. As Macbeth’s memories slowly crystalize, the show develops into a verbal tennis match as the two explore their shared past, the nebulous space they find themselves in, and what comes next, if anything. The intriguing thing about placing the action in a purgatorial waiting room, where neither can escape, is that even if Macbeth wishes to exit the hothouse environment in which Lady Macduff can throw her accusatorial arrows at him, he does not have that option. They are essentially trapped in a cage together, forced to settle their differences.
The show is well-cast and both Stange and Cody turn in strong performances. There is excellent chemistry between the two. Stange’s Macduff is regal, powerful and refuses to kowtow to Macbeth. She’s like an eagle; brave, watchful, still. Cody’s Macbeth is complex and slippery, brimming with ambition, regret, and maybe a sprinkling of vulnerability. Cody plays the character as vain and self-possessed, but also self-conscious, perhaps a little unseated by Macduff’s unwillingness to back down. He’s like a caged tiger crossed with an eel; he would most likely slink out of the room dramatically if he could, but of course he can’t, so he is a man in motion most of the time; he prowls around the space, looking for a way out, climbs onto the stools that are placed in the room (is he trying to demonstrate power over Macduff?), lets his hair down rather dramatically, then puts it back up. Even when Macduff encourages a moment of quiet, Macbeth is not a character at rest; I almost looked at my watch to see how long he could stay silent for; it wasn’t long. We are seeing the stripping of his power; by the end, he is just a man.
Rapier’s direction is taut and spare, with a great deal packed into a short running time of just under an hour. Rapier lets both the performers and the production values really shine. There is a commendable synergy among all the production values, which appear at times to be seeping into each other. The set, by Janice Chan, depicts five gigantic crinkled panels, lit with a combination of royal blues, peachy oranges, deep reds and rich purples by Emma Belnap, that subtly change colors at various times. The playing space has a mylar floor that is reflective, so the colors ooze into the floor, and there are five stools, each slightly different, like large chess pieces, that do not move, much as Macbeth tries to shift them when he’s exploring (maybe there’s a little door underneath one, an exit of sorts?) The costuming too, by Victoria Bird, echoes the colors of the set and lighting. Stange is dressed in warm colors and soft fabrics, a bright tangerine silk pleated skirt, and a cream silk shirt with a beige suit jacket, while Cody wears cooler hues, a gray three-piece suit with a snappy crimson tie and pocket square.
The Studio Theatre in its entirety is also a looming presence; the action happens in a contained space within the larger theater, so there’s an expanse of floor between the set and the audience, and the lighting leaks at times onto that floor and the brick wall to the audience’s right. We can also clearly see the lighting grid above. It is a striking, memorable set up, and in a perfect Brechtian move, there is no forgetting we are in a theater. Brecht adopted the technique of distancing the audience from intense empathic involvement in the action of a play, in order to encourage and enable them to reflect objectively on the content, themes and messages inherent in that action.
The sound design by Cheryl Cluff is like a third character in the piece; director Rapier explained that the sound is the actors humming “uhhhhhhhh” at different pitches that Cluff then manipulated. That soundtrack runs quietly under the whole show, which isn’t distracting but rather gives the piece a sense of urgency and intensity.
All in all, “Bitter Lemon” is a thought-provoking piece, addressing themes such as power, ambition, betrayal, and redemption, which in 2024 are just as relevant as they were some 400 years ago when “Macbeth” was written. Shakespeare’s play is a cautionary tale about the fragility of power and the consequences of unchecked ambition, and serves as a poignant reflection of contemporary society. On a smaller scale, Larson’s play causes us to ask ourselves: If you were trapped in a room with a contentious figure from your past and neither of you could go anywhere, what would you say, what would they, and would you be able to move forward?
For more information on the show and for tickets, click here.
