‘Macbeth’ with no lady?

In a nearly pitch-dark room, the banquet scene from Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” is coming alive.

“Come, love and health to all ... ,” intones the host as he crosses a stage covered with shimmering black sand and makes his way toward a bank of chairs that are suddenly -- and invisibly -- filled with feasting guests.

A ghost appears as the tormented Macbeth proposes a toast: “I drink to th’ general joy o’ th’ whole table, / And to our dear friend Banquo, whom we miss.”

It is a visceral scene, and Macbeth’s anguish is palpable. Everyone is there: a French-speaking Lady Macbeth at her husband’s side, Banquo’s ghost and of course the reveling lords. But this is hardly Shakespearean business as usual.

There is, after all, only one actor bringing this entire tragedy to life.

Yes, one: Stephen Dillane. And one director: Travis Preston. Together, they have ensconced themselves in this black box theater on the CalArts campus, bent on forging a staging of Shakespeare’s play that is singular in more than one sense of the word.

In “Macbeth (A Modern Ecstasy),” Dillane performs the whole play solo, accompanied by a trio of musicians led by jazz artist Vinny Golia. The production, which begins previews Tuesday, opens Dec. 1 at REDCAT.

It’s a daunting venture, even for a seasoned stage artist such as Dillane, and one that raises the question: Why?

“I have felt quite stale recently, and I needed to jump into something which seemed like too much, just to see what would happen,” explains the quietly intense actor. “I just haven’t had the passion for the work that I used to have, and I wanted to give it one more shot to see if I could reawaken that.”

The notion of a one-actor “Macbeth” first occurred to Preston years ago, when he was directing a production of the play in Denmark. “I realized how much text Macbeth had in the piece and how much the play seemed to emerge from his consciousness,” he says. “It seemed that that kind of intensity and concentration could be realized very effectively by a single performer.”

Yet even though they’d had it in mind for years, such an ambitious project is invariably more so once you’re in the thick of it.

“I still have to be talked out of the trees every now and then, when I come in and say this just isn’t going to happen, it’s just impossible,” Dillane admits. “I regularly think that it’s just stupid.”

The greater character

Even when you have one actor for each role, “Macbeth,” with its 32-plus characters, is no walk in the park. Shakespeare’s tale of the murderous rise and fall of an ambitious Scottish general and his famously scheming wife doesn’t lend itself to the kind of contemporary updating favored in regional theater productions.

“One of the things that’s really important to remember about the work is that it will resist conceptual reduction of almost any kind,” says Preston, whose extensive work in the classical canon has included many radical reinterpretations of Shakespeare and Ibsen, in addition to opera. “It will accept your whole imagination and all of your impulses -- anything you care to throw at it, except trying to reduce it.”

Instead of focusing on Macbeth as a warrior and politician, Preston and Dillane are homing in on less tangible aspects of the character’s power. “What has emerged is the presence of Macbeth as a visionary, and that’s irrespective of how we might relate to the horrific nature of some of the things that he does,” Preston says. “One of the things that’s astonishing is that despite the horrors that we can attribute to him, he seems profoundly close, not alien as some other figures in Shakespeare might appear.”

Supernatural elements figure prominently in the play, embodied not only by the three Weird Sisters who prophesy Macbeth’s rise but by larger forces driving the action. “There’s a kind of vision quest that has been incited, maybe not necessarily initiated by Macbeth’s own devices but somehow thrust upon him, and this trajectory takes him into areas of human experience that we cannot access ourselves,” Preston says. “Shakespeare takes the character there in order to give us signs of something that we can suspect but not know.”

Such challenges are particularly appealing to Preston, as was the prospect of working so closely with one performer. His last outing for the Center for New Theater at CalArts, of which he is artistic director, was a site-specific all-female “King Lear,” seen in 2002 at the Brewery Arts Center and later at the Frictions Festival in Dijon, France. Other CNT productions have included Chen Shi-Zheng’s “Peach Blossom Fan” and Richard Foreman’s “Bad Behavior.”

Preston had known Dillane for 20 years off and on when he first approached him about “Macbeth.” Dillane is best known for his stage work in London and on Broadway, where he won a 2000 Tony Award for best actor for his performance in “The Real Thing.” On film, he has played Horatio in Franco Zeffirelli’s “Hamlet” and the role of Leonard Woolf in “The Hours.”

Dillane had been offered the role of Macbeth several times before, but he’d turned it down. “I couldn’t see how the play could work,” he says. “It seems as if the first two-thirds of the play really is inside Macbeth’s head, and the last third is somewhere else.”

So when Preston floated the notion that it’s actually a single consciousness at work, Dillane felt that might be a way to address his concerns. “The experience I have a lot when I read Shakespeare is that it’s infinitely more powerful when I first read it than it ever is when I see it performed,” Dillane says. “There [are] connections being made in my head when I read it that are dissolved when they’re put up onstage. But I’ve always wanted to try to find a way of making those connections, and this seemed like a way of doing that.”

Two years ago, when Dillane happened to be in L.A. for another job, he and Preston spent two weeks exploring the text. After that the next step was unclear.

“It was always in my mind to do it, but it was tricky to find a way to move it forward,” Preston recalls. Then, in August 2003, Preston discussed the project with Robert Blacker, who at the time was artistic director of the Sundance Theatre Labs. Blacker and his Sundance partner Philip Himberg invited Preston and Dillane to spend several weeks in residence at the 2004 lab in Utah, working on “Macbeth.”

The experience proved both invaluable and crucially laissez-faire. “There was certainly some impulse to free ourselves from a ‘professional’ environment,” Preston says. “It was a very rare environment at Sundance in which we were basically alone, unobserved in the best sense. If somebody had walked in, they would have said, ‘What are these guys doing? They’re not going to get this play on at all.’ It didn’t have any of the signifiers of serious professionals doing serious work.”

But, in fact, they did exactly what they were supposed to do there. “At Sundance, Travis and Stephen launched into a ferocious reexamination of Shakespeare’s text and asked important questions about their approach to it,” Blacker says. “What does it mean to have all the text spoken by one actor? How does that affect the way that we receive the play? They would do exhausting work in the rehearsal room and then hike up Mt. Timpanogos to unwind.”

“It was a privileged environment,” Dillane says. “The professional world is, even at its best, tied up with product, tied up with ‘well, where is this going?’ And we gave ourselves the space in which not to ask that question.”

Taking the time

In addition to the three weeks at Sundance, Preston and Dillane will have rehearsed for eight weeks at CalArts. That’s in stark contrast to the standard four weeks most plays get, some even less.

“In a four-week rehearsal period, dealing with things at this depth, it’s just not possible to get to the play,” Dillane says. “That makes me, in a conventional, professional environment, depressed. It may be that that’s the only thing that can release us from jadedness, to get back to that feeling where you’re innocent in the work.”

The expanded preparation time also allowed Dillane and Preston to delve into the intangible -- both in the play itself and in their own creative process.

“The process was really to do with trying to create a space in which our impulses could be released to go wherever they would,” Dillane says. “Of course some of them have dropped by the wayside long since, but a lot of them have been indicators to the deep tides of the play that we respond to once we remove our judgmental minds.”

That’s not to say that the collaborators forswore studying the text, merely that it wasn’t the only level on which they were interacting with the play. “Of course we’re actually making observations about the text,” says Preston. “But all of these legitimate analytical revelations are somehow in themselves meaningless. They find their meaning when Steve embodies the characters and the dramatic progression. Our reason and rational minds are not so prominent, and decisions aren’t made in quite that way.”

The subconscious looms large, and both Preston and Dillane say that is exactly as it should be. “I think it’s generally true of acting that any decision that you take is probably wrong,” Dillane adds. “It limits you to your intellectual, rational mind. And this comes from somewhere else.”

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‘Macbeth (A Modern Ecstasy)’

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

When: Opens Dec. 1. 8:30 p.m., Tuesdays through Sundays

Ends: Dec. 12

Price: $8 to $40

Contact: (213) 237-2800