At first thought, Macbeth seems an odd candidate for a same-sex production, unless you want to turn the power couple at its center into a couple of mediæval Scottish lesbians. After all, Lady Macbeth pushes her husband to the murder that will start his downward spiral into paranoia and tyranny by impugning his manhood and implicitly threatening to pull a Lysistrata. Marya Lowry, a black-clad soldier sporting a mane of blond hair, and Paula Plum, cinched into a stiff bit of feminine armor over clingy red velour, do not sexualize the Macbeths: their partnership is intimate and intense but more boardroom than boudoir. But the production, a collaboration between Krstansky and the cast, introduces a primal female connection between the witches and Lady Macbeth, who wakes screaming from a nightmare that would appear to have been their initial, orgiastic huddle. In Plum’s provocative reading, Lady M., though a sneeringly tough cookie who cows the servants, has a bit of the irrepressible hysteric in her from the get-go. Add internalized guilt and terror at how Duncan’s murder has unhinged her husband and a furious hand-washing craziness is not far away. Lowry’s authoritative if sullen Macbeth, on the other hand, reacts to guilt with increasingly irrational aggression. Just like a guy — though, once his back is to the wall, an exceptionally bad one.
In terms of gender exploration, the standout is Jacqui Parker, a hard-edged if family-friendly, very military Banquo. Bobbie Steinbach, clad in a white suit and shakily maneuvering a cane, is an avuncular Big Daddy of a Duncan and makes fine comic relief of the Porter, as well as holding up her third of those sexual and shimmering rag-bag witches. Sarah Newhouse pulls off the trick of presenting a flinty Macduff and his brutally murdered wife. And newcomer Robin JaVonne Smith proves a sincere, well-spoken Malcolm. The haunted, haunting production is abetted by Susan Zeeman Rogers’s set design, which features kitchen knives as if hung by Rachel Ray, and by David Wilson’s sound design, which is full of thunder, seaside cawing, and even a fractured lullaby to set off the play’s theme of fathers and sons.
The title of A HOUSE WITH NO WALLS is a double-whammy metaphor. The third leg of Thomas Gibbons’s “race trilogy,” which is being presented by New Repertory Theatre (at the Arsenal Center for the Arts through November 18), was inspired by a 2002 controversy about whether to erect the Liberty Bell Center on the foundation of what had been George Washington’s Philadelphia manse, with the entrance atop his slave quarters. The notion of a house with no walls refers first to the slave dwelling itself, whose walls offered no protection, and then to a proposed monument that would commemorate Washington’s slaves without hiding the 21st-century museum entrance behind it. As with Bee-Luther-Hatchee and Permanent Collection, Gibbons imposes a fictional situation on the actual argument. But unlike Permanent Collection, which New Rep produced several seasons ago, the new play, seen here in a “rolling world premiere” at several regional theaters, feels less like a drama than like a staged debate, full of speechifying that Lois Roach’s credible production cannot ameliorate.
