Toil and Trouble in the Tobacco Warehouse
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
“There is no smoking anywhere in the Tobacco Warehouse.” Not since President Merkin Muffley of “Dr. Strangelove” chastised two Cold War combatants for fighting in the war room has so ludicrous a decree been issued as this preshow announcement, currently on offer at this roofless, Civil War-era structure located in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. It promises a level of shrewd self-awareness that remains sadly unmatched in the lead-footed production of “Macbeth” that follows.
Director Grzegorz Jarzyna, manning the highly touted Polish theater troupe TR Warszawa, has pasted together a daffy and cartoonishly bleak mash-up of Regietheater and the Classics Illustrated comics beloved to so many young readers, particularly those with a book report overdue. Regietheater, for those unversed in contemporary European stagecraft, is a sort of fetishization of postmodernism that took root in opera before becoming the current default style for avant-garde international theater. When it makes headlines in America, it’s usually because an opera director has visited our shores to either desecrate or transform (depending on whom you ask) a canonical work. The Regietheater checklist typically includes assaultive sound effects, shoehorned parallels to contemporary politics, and the liberal use of pop-culture tropes and strenuously scandalous eroticism. Intermissions are verboten.
And so Mr. Jarzyna ladles war atrocities in the Middle East, a silver-bra-wearing soldier, a stripper in an Elvis jumpsuit, and a prestidigitating Uncle Sam onto Shakespeare’s moderately accommodating skeleton. Much has been made in the press about the tortuous, years-long effort on the part of St. Ann’s Warehouse, the performing venue located across the street from the Tobacco Warehouse, to bring this production to New York. What has been less well-documented is the appearance of so much comparable theater in those intervening years, from fellow Europeans (Ivo van Hove, Thomas Ostermeier) but also in diluted form from any number of homegrown companies (Nature Theater of Oklahoma, National Theater of the United States of America). Mr. Jarzyna’s coals have finally arrived in a city that has increasingly come to resemble Newcastle.
What he forgot to bring was a deserving text. The text is performed in Polish, with supertitles projected in the middle of Stephanie Nelson and Agnieszka Zawadowska’s brutalist set, a concrete slab that includes several grisly touches familiar from Rupert Goold’s far more cohesive “Macbeth,” which moved to Broadway after opening at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Headsets provide amplified performances as well as an intricate and commendable soundscape. Shakespeare’s greatest hits remain unscathed: It’s still a dagger that Macbeth (Cezary Kosinski) sees before him, and that damned spot is still pestering Lady Macbeth (Aleksandra Konieczna). But large swaths of the original have given way to platitudes that are both literally and figuratively prosaic. Compare “I am in blood / Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er,” Shakespeare’s nimble blend of regret and rationalization, to Mr. Jarzyna’s approximation: “I am knee-high in a bloody quagmire. I have reached a place from which there is no return.” The larger point here is that there is a return but that Macbeth is able to convince himself the journey isn’t worth making.
A few actors claw their way out from under this reductive script and micromanaged mayhem. While Macbeth’s initial reluctance to set the play’s murderous wheels in motion has been compromised — Mr. Jarzyna establishes his bloodthirstiness in a new prologue wherein “Major Macbeth” engages in some unprompted wet work against unnamed Muslims — Mr. Kosinski creates a battle-numbed warrior with the vacant, heavy-lidded menace of a film noir villain. (Less successful is Ms. Konieczna, whose Lady Macbeth is hemmed in by her Bettie Page bangs and geisha stylizations.) Tomasz Tyndyk provides a lithe and wary Banquo, and Danuta Stenka derives some campy heft from Mr. Jarzyna’s reimagining of the three witches as a bald femme fatale seen in first a Muslim chador and then a decidedly impious pink minidress. And despite the distancing use of video screens, Michal Zurawski holds the audience’s attention with the agonized cries of Macduff, a man who has outlived — and, he realizes, inadvertently destroyed — his wife and children.
What we don’t see, however, is the dialogue that immediately precedes this, the strange and sobering original Act 4 scene in which Macduff and his fellow exile Malcolm discuss the inevitability of political corruption with a chilling blend of misery, cynicism, and ambition-fueled realpolitik. This nuanced dialogue — a virtual treatise on the difficulties of statecraft — has no room in Mr. Jarzyna’s cluttered conception. He has assembled a war room, one suitable for little more than fighting.
Until June 29 (Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park, DUMBO, Brooklyn, 718-254-8779).