Lantern Theater Company presents Shakespeare’s Macbeth

Perhaps Shakespeare’s most purely engaging tragedy, Macbeth needs little directorial intervention to succeed—but it does need a steady hand to unify performances, action, and mood. In this sense, Lantern fails considerably. The visual world of the staging looks blandly traditional and shockingly cheap, with Scott Cassidy and Kate Coots’s set dominated by Styrofoam rocks and several skinny pillars meant to signify Birnam Wood. The unfortunate choice of an alley configuration meant that I spent at least half of the performance staring at the back of someone’s head—and the other half staring at a man mouthing Shakespearean gibberish in time with the actors on the opposite side of the auditorium.

Seeking a stirring performance

Leigh Paradise costumes a majority of the male-presenting actors in Scottish tartan. Yet in their starched white blouses and pleated kilts, they more closely resemble Neumann Goretti co-eds than Scots noblemen. Lady Macbeth and the Weird Sisters are attired in colorless and ill-fitting sack dresses that look like they came from Spirit Halloween. Perhaps luckily, Shon Causer’s muddy lighting design obscures these hapless sartorial choices some of the time.

Stirringly performed Shakespeare can always overcome subpar production. A skillful company could perform this poetry on a bare stage and still grip an audience’s attention. On opening night at Lantern, it often seemed like we were watching an early rehearsal rather than a finished production. With lines either rushed or delivered tentatively, the performers rarely lose themselves in the Bard’s bloody world, and the psychological dimensions that underpin the actions of the characters hardly seem evident.

There are exceptions. J Hernandez employs his strong voice and innate faculty for metered verse to fully communicate the tragic cost of Banquo’s loyalty to Macbeth. Jered McLenigan renders an earnest, dignified Macduff. Although Frank X appears somewhat wan as King Duncan, he performs the Porter’s brief scene with an equal amount of humor and pathos.

As the Weird Sisters, Rachel Brodeur, Eli Lynn, and Amanda Schoonover are neither viscerally scary nor ethereally unsettling. And in the production’s most pronounced error, Anthony Lawton and Karen Peakes make for a mismatched Lord and Lady Macbeth, his quiet, introspective delivery chafing against her broad, comedic style. Both could likely be effective with a stronger directorial hand and a more appropriate scene partner, but here they flounder. I don’t envy Peakes having to perform Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene while holding a cheesy electric candle, but I don’t think I’ve seen an actor make less of this chilling moment.

Perspective needed

Nor have I seen in Philadelphia a Shakespeare staging so utterly devoid of any perspective. McMahon founded Lantern in 1994, and the company has offered something by the Bard in nearly every season hence. In the past, I’ve enjoyed their thoughtful reinventions (a Japanese-influenced Julius Caesar in 2014; a #MeToo-inspired Measure for Measure in 2019) and their more traditional takes (a very fine Tempest in 2018 and Twelfth Night in 2023 come immediately to mind).

But a production as rote and inept as this Macbeth makes me wonder: what perspective does this company still have to offer as it enters its fourth decade? I’m not sure I have an answer. In the meantime, we are left with little sound or fury, still signifying nothing.