Adam Best, Nicole Cooper, Star Penders, Emmanuella Cole, James Robinson, Taqi Nazeer, Laurie Scott, and Marc Mackinnon in Macbeth (an undoing). Photo: Gerry Goodstein

Lady Macbeth disappears for the entirety of Act 4 of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and when she returns it’s as a pale, tormented shadow of the fiery woman who, in full partnership with her husband, spurs Macbeth on to murder and the throne. Lady Macduff appears in but one scene in the Scottish play, immediately before she and her children are brutally murdered. The three witches, who begin with such compelling and strange power and trigger the bloody events that ripple through the play, have likewise faded by the end. Macbeth dies on the battlefield, but Lady Macbeth dies a broken shell of a woman, crippled by her own guilt. The latter half of Macbeth slowly drains the fortitude, the vitality, the very life, of its women–particularly notable because, at first, Lady Macbeth seems to have more aptitude for violence than Macbeth, and sees more quickly than her husband the dark deeds that their ambitions may require. 

Zinnie Harris, writer and director of Macbeth (an undoing)–brought to New York by the Shakespeare Exchange, an international partnership between Theatre for a New Audience and the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh–pries open that fault line in the narrative and builds a whole new play inside of it. Harris’s characters, her plot, even much of her dialogue comes from Shakespeare, but she turns Macbeth inside out and examines all its seams, indeed “undoing” its relationships before weaving a new garment from the materials. Here, Lady Macbeth (Nicole Cooper) is not merely the power behind the throne, but the central figure; here, there are other women who stick around for the entire narrative. Harris gives names–Carlin (Liz Kettle), Missy (Star Penders), and Mae (Emanuella Cole)–and at least sketches of distinct personalities to the witches. (More like archetypes, really; it’s loosely a maiden/mother/crone setup, but not quite so stark.)  She builds Lady Macduff (also Cole) into a central figure, part ally and part foil to her sister/cousin, Lady Macbeth. Lady Macduff is heavily pregnant where Lady Macbeth has failed five times to bear a surviving child. She knows better than to let her infant anywhere near Lady Macbeth. She’s flirtatious and coy where Lady Macbeth is steely and resolute, carrying on a dangerous flirtation with Banquo (James Robinson), but she’s also no fool, and knows when to retreat to her own home. 

And Harris also turns her keen eye onto other contexts and themes that Shakespeare only gestures to: The brutal violence of war–the herald who opens the play (Taqi Nazeer) is mortally wounded, filthy and bloody and close to slipping into coma. The labor of running a royal court (albeit not a medieval one; this piece is set between World Wars I and II)–the place is full of servants, cleaning up the messes the Macbeths make, doing their bidding, and finding moments of sly rebellion in it.

And in addition to all that, Harris constructs, with its seams showing, a metatheatrical frame device, a narrative that comments on the ways the familiar story clashes with the one Harris is trying to reassemble the pieces into. But old narratives die hard, and sometimes even fight back; the palimpsest of Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth always peers out from beneath Harris’s. (Shakespeare’s version of Lady Macbeth’s decline and death is mapped onto Macbeth at first, but then gradually that burden creeps back onto Lady Macbeth’s shoulders.) Similarly, the play’s supernatural elements are massaged into more prosaic ones, in theory: Lady Macbeth knows the witches; rather than being messengers of the future, they’re poor local residents with whom she alternates between giving them food and money and having them thrown off her land. But then those prophecies, and sometimes ghosts, keep rearing their heads. The strange noises in the night are birds, who keep getting into the dining hall…or are they something else? (Pippa Murphy’s sound design is a key production element throughout, never obtrusive but always ramping up the stakes and tension.)

The downside of the complex web being woven here is that at times, the writing needs to lean toward the expository just to help us figure out which layer of narrative we’re in or to sharpen the point of the message we’re meant to take from it. The more Harris deviates from Shakespeare, the more she has to explain and underscore, and even so, certain moments feel both heavy-handed and slippery in meaning at once. Is Lady Macbeth demanding a clean dress from her servant or is the actress demanding one from a stagehand? Was she promised that inside the narrative–the character slipping off the burden of her actions?–or only in the framing device–the actor refusing to travel to her character’s predestined end? 

But if the script can falter, especially as it reaches its ambiguous conclusion(s)–both marshaled back in line with Shakespeare and finding one last “fragment” of its alternate narrative–Harris’s work with the actors, especially, fittingly, the women, stays strong. Nicole Cooper’s Lady Macbeth is passionate and pointed, operating behind a mask of steely control, until the story starts, on both levels, to slip beyond her control. Emanuella Cole’s Lady Macduff lulls you into thinking her shallow and frivolous, until she has to defend herself and her home, and she proves able to muster her own store of imperiousness (she has less to do as witch Mae, but her laugh is haunting). Star Penders shifts from witch to comic relief as a none-too-bright Prince Malcolm, rightful heir to Duncan’s throne. And Liz Kettle, playing the roles of narrator, the witch Carlin, and Lady Macbeth’s handmaid, sometimes all at once, is a master of the Brechtian trick of acting and commenting on her own choices at the same time; watching her put on and take off the maid’s stooped back and downtrodden physicality is a wry joy in and of itself. By contrast, the men in the cast feel intentionally a bit reined in; the focus is intentionally shifted off them, which isn’t a criticism. Adam Best’s straightforward and disarmingly honest Macbeth; James Robinson’s playboy Banquo, leaning to his Scottish accent and kilt; Thierry Mabonga’s maddeningly calm doctor: all well-played, all incisive. It’s just that the play isn’t about them.

I’m not sure Macbeth (an undoing) hangs together in the end, but the way it troubles and burrows under the skin of Macbeth is intriguing in an unsettling way–like the Scottish play itself.