Shotgun Players present "Macbeth" December 4, 2008

Shotgun Players present William Shakespeare's
"Macbeth"
Directed by Mark Jackson

Pay What You Can performances 12/4, 12/5 & 12/7
Opening Night: 12/6
Superdeluxe New Year's Eve performance with an after-party!

Meet the Macbeths: two young, wealthy hipsters with exceedingly sharp tastes in clothing and insatiable appetites for more of everything. Their empty cradle leaves them unable to make a life for themselves, and their ambitions turn toward more material means of self-definition: money, fashion, fame and power! Macbeth has never looked so good, or killed with such style.

"Macbeth" is expected to be grim and overcast, but in this production director Mark Jackson ("The Forest War," "The Death of Meyerhold") does away with the shadows in favor of bright lights, an architecturally modern stage, and colors from the contemporary pallet.

This is a story about ambition, and in today’s America ambition, even political ambition, is tragically caught up in fame, money, and fashions of all kinds. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are caught in an ugly upper-crust web of frustrated ambition themselves. If children cannot secure their future, then borrowed robes will fashion their present and blood will cement the deal. Fashion show iconography, as well as the appearance of a runway onstage to reflect Shakespeare’s traditional thrust staging will blast the play into the modern sphere.

The Shotgun production will act as both a wake up call and a surprise—both to entertain and provoke in the way useful theater should: This is not your mother’s "Macbeth." Those interested in roller coasters should stick around.

Official Website: http://www.shotgunplayers.org/macbeth.htm