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There’s a hint of malice in Lucas;
Anna mentions in passing that he some-
times hit her as he thrashed around in
his sleep. In a moment of sudden inti-
macy, he seems able to access love only
through a flash of violence. This phys-
icality makes Cannavale a natural fit
to play him. A solid, surprisingly grace-
ful presence onstage, Cannavale moves
like a linebacker with a background in
modern dance. Lucas is a huckster—
his stratospheric rise as a scientist was
achieved by passing off Anna’s work as
his own. As he struts around in glasses,
a chic suit, and expensive-looking boots,
Cannavale, whose face flushes red at the
first hint of perturbation, makes clear
that attention to men’s-fashion blogs is
no sign of deeper cultivation. Who
knows what, beyond the cheating and
the intellectual theft, has driven Anna
to the deeds that give this story its
bloody end?
Lucas and Anna have two sons,
Edgar and Gus. For a school project,
the boys are making an incredibly poorly
timed documentary film about their
home life. They scoot across the stage,
sticking the camera where it doesn’t
belong, catching their parents in mo-
ments of worry and despair. On a wide
screen above the stage, the audience
sees what’s flowing through the lens.
Via closeups, especially on Byrne, we
follow the action more as a TV show
than as a play.
The advantage of the gimmick is
that we see what a subtly soulful comic
performer Byrne is (the first time I saw
her onscreen was in the great buddy
comedy “Bridesmaids”), with a classi-
cal clown’s range of facial expressions,
zinging from doltish, glassy-eyed smiles
to devastating droops around the cor-
ners of her mouth. Hers is the kind of
repertoire that is best picked up by a
camera; it’s especially interesting to scru-
tinize her this way given the play’s un-
derhum of unease about how women’s
rage is often medicalized rather than
intently engaged: it’s fine to watch her
closely, but listening is optional.
Unfortunately, the screen saps ki-
netic force from where it belongs, in
the physical space onstage—attentive
energy is zero-sum, no matter what the
multitaskers tell you—and creates an
awkward distance between two forms
of acting, filmic and theatrical. The di-
vide does a disservice to both forms,
and traps Byrne’s performance some-
where in the air above the first row.
The farther along the drama goes,
the less Simon depends on the screen
for his effects. How liberating for Byrne!
The need to face both Lucas and the
audience straight on, in the flesh, in-
stead of by visual projection, makes her
voice deepen and her physical aspect
appear more grave. (Maybe this is the
point of the gambit with the screen,
and its gradual recession: we go from
a dark sitcom to something unfathom-
ably more serious.) Anna feels as real
and as horrifying as the evening news,
ready to do something she can’t undo,
make a stain you could never scrub out.I
n 2014, two preteen girls lured a class-
mate into the woods on the pretense
of everyday fun, and killed her. They
were under the occult influence of a fic-
tional Internet character called Slender
Man, and said that they thought they
were making a sacrifice that would prove
their faithfulness to him. The story in-spired Erica Schmidt to put the con-
founded anguish of “Macbeth” into the
mouths of girls. In “Mac Beth,” a group
of schoolgirls in gray-and-maroon uni-
forms perform the drama in a junk-
strewn forest clearing as a high-concept
joke among friends.
Even as it becomes evident that ev-
erybody’s not quite playing the same
game, it’s miraculous to see the play split
in two, and performed like a duet in
tight harmony. Shakespeare’s still there,
as lucid as ever—Schmidt’s poetically
choreographed direction affects diction
as much as movement, and her actors’
speech grows out of fertile symbolic soil,
carrying so much meaning. But, as
Shakespeare’s story unspools, we see the
girls trying on poses, finding in words
several centuries old a strangely neat
container for feelings—libidinal and
sisterly at once—that they only faintly
knew could be expressed. When Lady
Macbeth (an ardent, intelligent Isme-
nia Mendes) wishes to be “unsexed,”
and Macduff (Camila Canó-Flaviá),
whose role makes her seem prematurely
and genuinely doused in grief, declares
a need to “feel” her child’s death “like a
man,” we hear these as desires for yet
more expressive range, as imagined ex-
tensions of what it means to act.
Brittany Bradford is astounding as
Macbeth. Her every thought registers
first in her body and next in her voice.
Meaning ripples across her like waves
across a pond. She’s got a hard job: she
has to be the paranoid Scot and a ner-
vously charismatic kid, an old mask and
a naked face, fact and fiction, all at once.
She’s looking for the kind of control—a
fleeting cleanliness—that we all grasp
at, and fail to hold on to for long.