TR Warszawa's Macbeth 2008

Marylin Stasio, VARIETY

Ouch. Tough luck for St. Ann's Warehouse that much of the theatrical thunder for its hugely ambitious production of "TR Warszawa's Macbeth 2008" was snatched away by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which got there first with Chichester Festival Theater's brutalist version of Shakespeare's drama. Granted, the Brits didn't build a two-story, multichambered, 36-foot-high open-air stage on the East River waterfront, or truck in tons of equipment to make a multimedia statement. But they did beat the Poles to the militaristic vision and anti-fascist message, and they did it without sacrificing poetry to technology.

OK, forget the Brits. Grzegorz Jarzyna, the iconoclastic artistic director of the avant-garde Polish theater company TR Warszawa, has a right to his own vision. It's essentially a cinematic one, full of sound and fury and technical virtuosity.

The cubicles of the multiplex stage function like a split screen, with lighting cues pinpointing the eye to the appropriate chamber, while leaving the silent scenes being played out around it to peripheral vision. In effect, this means we become fully engaged in a scene set in the castle where Macbeth is plotting murder, while being vaguely aware that, down below in the dungeon, prisoners in Muslim garb are being tortured.

In the same way that he uses cinematic cues to keep those eyeballs in motion, Jarzyna uses blanket sound -- from pop songs to high-amped noise effects -- to play tricks on the ear. (Is Macbeth really going into battle in a helicopter? And is that an AK-47 he's shooting?)

If the plot so far sounds a bit foreign and rather anachronistic, that's because Jarzyna isn't really putting on Shakespeare's "Macbeth," but his own impressions of the play, refracting the story events through his own political sensibility.

The textual alterations can be eye-opening or jaw-dropping. Reducing the three cackling witches to one sexy, bald-headed dominatrix in a flaming fuchsia dress is pretty good. Directing Lady Macbeth to urinate onstage before she kills herself, not so good. Banquo's ghost arriving naked at the banquet hall -- so-so. Banquo's ghost bleeding from the neck -- better. As for the masturbating man in the rabbit suit, what can we say?

Maybe the show's best effect is the huge screen that pops up whenever Macbeth is delivering an interior monologue. As played by Cezary Kosinski, presumably on directorial orders, the character is a robotic zombie wholly created by the military system he lives by. That 20-foot screen image of his blank face does nothing to humanize him, but it does make him a proper monster.

Good or bad, the technology is always fun to watch. But it can't make up for the lost humanity or the mangled poetry -- all sacrificed to the political cause.

At first, it seems as if the palpable presence of the Manhattan skyline and the pulsing throb of traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge might prove more of a distraction than an enhancement of Jarzyna's vision of Macbeth as the product of his militaristic society. But in the end, the city becomes part of the piece, which is deliberately set in a fascist culture -- and the culture is ours. From our visitors' perspective, they are delivering their message in the belly of the beast.