Actor grabs Macbeth by throat

Out, damned spot. And while you’re at it, out, damned Duncan, damned Banquo, damned witches, damned Macduff, damned everybody.

“Macbeth” at REDCAT is only Macbeth. And even that isn’t quite true. “Macbeth (A Modern Ecstasy)” at REDCAT is the embodiment of Macbeth, the spirit of Shakespeare made flesh. It is the performance of a single actor, Stephen Dillane, and it is a performance -- prodigious, incandescent, incantatory -- that defies belief.

The stage is bare but for a dirt floor, a wall, a chair. Dillane, barefoot and wearing a suit and open plumb shirt, inhabits it without registering that he is in it or of it. He begins not in thunder, lightning, or in rain but with the King’s first line, “What bloody man is that?”

No world, no weather, and a bloody man unlike any I have seen onstage before.

For nearly two hours, he recites far more of Shakespeare’s text than seems possible for a single brain to contain. For nearly two hours, he intones, barely needing to breathe, far longer than seems possible (and surely healthy) for a single set of vocal cords to sustain.

As if possessed, Shakespeare pours out of him in unstoppable flood. He channels Macbeth and he channels “Macbeth.” That is to say, he is Macbeth, he is all characters in the play, and he is none. Rising above narrative and traditional theater, he reveals Shakespeare’s language as the real drama. He liberates words from their prison of context and meaning, causing them to cast a spell in their own right. Some of the most perfectly formed sentences in English become a stream of consciousness, newly mysterious and compelling.

Travis Preston, the director, says in his program note that he had wanted “to explore the inner landscape of Macbeth’s tortured soul” with this production by the Center for New Theater at CalArts and created for the Institute’s high-tech black box space in the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Having gone the opposite direction with a splashy, big-budget, special-effects-laden, environmental “King Lear” in an abandoned brewery two years ago, Preston here strips Shakespeare’s theater bare. But in the stripping he finds even greater extravaganzas of emotion.

Dillane’s only accompaniment are three experimental jazz musicians, led by Vinny Golia on his deep bass and ultra-deep bass reeds. Their contribution is appropriately modest. The low, low notes, often slow and sustained, are a sturdy soniferous mattress on which Dillane’s voice can rest and gambol. At a few ripe moments, guitar (Jeremy Drake) and percussion (Harris Eisenstadt) add conventional dramatic underpinning.

But the music’s main function is to underscore the ritualistic nature of Dillane’s performance. He slides in and out of characters with such snake-like slipperiness that I usually found myself several beats behind him. He may assume the ladylike voice of Lady Macbeth, the stammer of Malcolm, but he also may not. Often he is still, his voice flat and uninflected, the actor as mechanical vessel for his lines. Other times, he is boldly physical, crudely comic or just plain crazed: He crawls in the dirt, beats his breast, bumps and grinds, leaps into the audience, regularly catches you off guard.

In the end, Preston and Dillane, in this brilliant effort, go beyond exploring a tortured mind, beyond psychology. They may here and there turn to traditional theatrical devises for psychological investigation -- Christopher Barreca’s minimalist set sets mood; Benoit Beauchamp’s lighting is effective -- but Dillane’s endurance test breaks down barriers in other, less explicable, more extraordinary ways. I just hope he doesn’t destroy himself in the process.

*

‘Macbeth (A Modern Ecstasy)’

Where: REDCAT at Walt Disney Concert Hall, 2nd and Hope streets, L.A.

When: 8:30 p.m. Thursdays through Sundays

Ends: Dec. 12

Price: $8 to $40

Contact: (213) 237-2800

Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes