STAGE REVIEW : ‘Megabeth’ Puts New Twist on Shakespeare

We’ve seen plays done in all sorts of places: on sound stages, up in trees, down in quarries, through the rooms of a house, in full swimming pools.

Paul Silverman’s “Megabeth,” however, may be the first production, though, to be set in the bottom of an empty one: the tarnished splendor of the quasi-Olympic-size indoor pool of Hollywood’s Sunset Landmark Building. It is lined with dark plastic sheeting that makes it look like “a gigantic garbage bag (hefty, hefty, hefty).”

Such wry self-derision and the unusual setting are not the only elements that make “Megabeth” unusual. It is, among other things, an ambitious rendering of a rock/Asiatic version of the “Macbeth” story that bears only the slightest connections to the Shakespearean original.

Shakespearean scholar Jan Kott is listed as dramaturg on the project and, yes, Kott and Silverman had long, intimate conversations about the project that Silverman characterizes jokingly as “mostly fights.” But it is a departure of a sort guaranteed to send purists into a tailspin.

So what is this “Megabeth”? A highly personalized, jumbled treatise on the polarized worlds of spirit and matter--the power of corruption and the corruption of power--sweetened with incense, spoken in English, chanted in Hebrew, shouted in Rock, punctuated by Japanese Taiko instruments and dressed in the yin/yang of monastic whites and blacks, dotted with violent, erotic reds.

The Duncan in this “Megabeth” is Gandhi. Infer what you will from this real-life substitution and murder--a stylized assassination by the shaven-headed Mark Bringelson as Mac/Megabeth with slow death to follow by Shishir as Gandhi. (It does seem to stoop rather low in the annals of song-punning, however, when we hear a snatch of “the Gandhiman can . . . “ as a rip-off of the “the candyman can.”)

Silverman is full of such ideas, rife with ideas, but often at cross-purposes. Some are downright strange: Megabeth’s first reunion with his lady, renamed the Lady M (a statuesque Patricia Tallman), finds him erotically circling toward her as he sings, “Beth, you is my woman now. . . .” Hmmmmm.

And some are powerful: Banquo, renamed Bukyo, at his first entrance stepping through a trough of black paint and leaving black footsteps on a white sheet; Megabeth, right behind him, stepping through red paint and leaving a wake of bloody footsteps.

Take the murder of the Duffs (MacDuffs to you). Silverman has Megabeth’s hired thugs in modern dress throw white cowls over the heads of Lady Duff (Jeanne Sakata) and her two children, and place an egg in their left hands. When Megabeth strikes each on the back of the head, the eggs break and the cowls become spattered with blood as they pitch forward to the floor.

It is this odd mix of realism and ritual, modernism thrown in with ancient Zen and Hebraic symbolism, that lets “Megabeth” slip in and out of our hands. Silverman has a rich vein of imagination (he acknowledges the influence of Polish poet-director Tadeusz Kantor) that remains turbulent. It needs sorting out. He has to retrench and define, be selective with methods and leave us with a clearer imprint than we now get from the profusion of criss-crossing signals.

Language poses a problem too. Very little of it is Shakespearean; some of it is as poetic as a Haiku (“Snow fell like stars in small calcium bodies”), but far too much of it is purely pedestrian, if not without some sense of humor about itself. Megabeth, in shades and a tennis outfit, quotes “L.R. Hubbard, B.S. Rajneesh and S. MacLaine” virtually in the same breath, distinguishes between rebels (Jesus) and revolutionaries (Gandhi and Mao) and sermonizes “take the word feel , California equivalent of think . I feel, therefore I am. . . .” But what, in the end, does it all mean?

The Voice of the Path (Jessica Peterson) serves beautifully as singer-narrator delivering her missing links in Hebraic minor keys, but what is that song called “Mother Teresa, the Tart From Albania,” accompanied by lewd gestures, doing here? And yet we have to admire the masculinization of Lady M as she gets older and more decadent and begins to crumble before our eyes. . . .

As in the Shakespeare play, Duff is the one who kills Megabeth. It is done here by skillful (and not gory) decapitation, and the play ends with an Israeli song and dance in which the black costumes (all but Duff’s) are now white--a symbol of rebirth, no doubt.

Be that as it may, we are given too much, too densely. “The gestures are always the same,” runs a line in the piece. “It is you behind the gesture (who make the difference).”

Silverman should pay heed. If “Megabeth” works only fitfully at best, it is the closest thing we’ve had to a signed work yet.

However, this writer left the performance Sunday thinking that someone with vision and money ought to restore the badly dilapidated swimming-pool. A valid thought, but the wrong one to be thinking upon leaving this production.

At 6525 Sunset Blvd., Fridays at 8:30 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays at 8 p.m, indefinitely. Tickets: $12.50; (213) 667-0119).