Radio Macbeth

"For those who know the tale, Radio Macbeth [is] a POTENT POTION ... [A] highly stylized 90-minute deconstruction and distillation ... [director Anne Bogart] has partnered intensely with her sound designer, Darron L. West, to conjure the kind of aural landscape - church chimes, relentless banging on a castle door, screams - that would make it ESPECIALLY FEARSOME on radio ... The usual emotional engagement is supplanted by a kind of heightened sensory alertness. Your synapses, if not your heart, are quickened."

"Stripped of the traditional sets and staging - but not its theatricality - the experimental ensemble company's Radio Macbeth gives a swift and bracing take that connects to the SPELLBINDING force of this bullet of a play ... This haunted and haunting production should find appreciative audiences that welcome non-conformist and expertly-rendered conceptions of familiar classics. Bogart sets the scene for both play and players with an aural underscore of tense beauty by Darron L. West ... TERRIFIC stage ideas and images."

"This is a production that treats that most notorious Shakespearean tragedy as a SYMPHONY OF SOUND. Its emphasis is on the cackle of a witch, the crack of a knock, the silence of the lonely and the guilty. I doubt you'll have thought about Macbeth that way before. Most productions get lost in a fog ... Radio Macbeth cuts all that away and leaves you, mostly, with the deconstructive sounds of clipped-down tragedy. It is a simple but PROVOCATIVE THEATRICAL EXPERIENCE. And its most distinctive achievement is to persuade you to look at - or, rather, hear - a Shakespearean tragedy in an entire new way, which, since directors have done Macbeth everywhere from Edinburgh to the moon, is no mean feat. If you've got a teen studying this play at school, take 'em to this and see what they say."

“… its ultimate consequence is to pull us out of the drama of Macbeth and incline us to hear it as dramatic prose instead. And that can be electrifying. I know it’s a ridiculously self-evident thing to say, but listening to Shakespeare’s language in this context made me realize what an amazingly good writer he was. And how mind-bogglingly insightful. I was struck as I’ve never been before by Macbeth’s profound—and from his point of view, utterly apt—nihilism when, on hearing of Lady Macbeth’s death, he calls life “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” It’s one thing to think you know what makes Shakespeare the Bard, another thing entirely to feel it in your gut.”

“Performing only in the light of a single candle, the statuesque Lauren shows us muscles by delivering Lady Macbeth’s breakdown as a near-opera. Lauren’s textured vocal instrument and unmatched emotional precision make this moment an acting lesson.”