‘Macbeth’ as a tech bro? This Crow’s Theatre revival takes a big swing but succumbs to its own ambition

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Here’s the thing about “Macbeth”: Much like whatever’s cooking in the witches’ cauldron, Shakespeare’s tragedy is a malleable recipe. Want to throw in an eye of newt and toe of…

Here’s the thing about “Macbeth”: Much like whatever’s cooking in the witches’ cauldron, Shakespeare’s tragedy is a malleable recipe. Want to throw in an eye of newt and toe of frog? Sure! Set it in a Soviet-style abattoir? Why not! Turn Macbeth into a burly, Quebecois motorcycle gang leader? Weird … but OK!

All that to say: Many things have to go wrong for this recipe to turn out sour. And yet, that’s what has happened in the ill-conceived revival at Crow’s Theatre, in a staging that’s packed with Icarian ambition but ultimately succumbs to a series of compounding missteps.

The critical issue with director Christopher Manousos’ production, which uses a text adapted from Shakespeare’s original by himself and the actor Evan Buliung, is that, unwittingly or not, it others its central anti-hero.

Macbeth, the thane who consolidates his power through murder, is a character who lies at the extremities of the human condition. He’s extremely ambitious. He’s extremely overconfident. When the witches proffer a series of ominous prophecies pointing to his undoing, he becomes extremely paranoid.

But what’s crucial to any revival of “Macbeth” is that the play’s protagonist needs to feel like an us, not a them. No matter the setting nor the framing, no matter how far removed Macbeth’s story may feel from our own, audiences need to see themselves in him. His ambition is our ambition. His folly is our folly. Therein lies the tragedy.

Manousos and Buliung’s creation, however, distances the audience from Macbeth, presenting the show as a play-within-a-play, set in what’s seemingly the present or the near future.

Buliung first appears not as Macbeth but as an unnamed man, lonely and relying on AI for companionship. “I’m pissed off. I feel like I’m not progressing and I don’t know what to do about it,” he says in an early scene, added by Buliung and Manousos, that does little to establish who this man is or what exactly he’s struggling with.

Soon, Buliung’s character is goaded by his…

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