Prof. James Shapiro
English 3335x – Shakespeare I
Macbeth Review
Present Company Artspace - October 7, 2000
All Is But Toys
Sometimes good things come in small packages, and the Tiny Ninja Theater’s presentation of Macbeth is no exception. Set on a three-foot-wide black table and starring inch-high plastic figurines, this miniature puppet show is funny, charming, and at times almost poignant. Admittedly, it’s hard not to giggle when hearing Shakespeare’s famous tragic lines spoken by a vending-machine ninja whose only discernible feature is that he’s holding two swords. Despite this, creator, director, puppeteer, and sole voice-actor Dov Weinstein stages a remarkably compelling version of this well-known classic.
Given the tiny scale of everything, I was glad to be sitting in the front row of the 16-person theater. As we entered, everyone was handed toy binoculars and told they were opera glasses. I found them useless, but this sense of humor inspires the entire production and surely helped it win awards at this year’s Fringe Festival. We all laughed when we saw Weinstein sitting behind the castle towers, invisible in black except for his microphoned face. But then the room went dark, a howling wind started, and a dim blue light illuminated the scene: dozens of ninjas lay dead as Banquo and Macbeth surveyed the carnage. An experienced Shakespeare actor, Weinstein immediately set the somber tone with the voices of the battle-weary warriors, despite Macbeth being a two-inch-high happy-faced figure with “Mr. Smile” written across his chest.
Although lacking costumes, backdrops, and music, the production is surprisingly elaborate. There are more than 200 vending-machine toys arranged into various combinations of characters. Besides ninjas and the smiley couple, there are also two robots and three green aliens for the murderers and witches. Additional spooky micro-props include a bell, a laser-pointer, and a tiny dagger that hovers in front of Macbeth as he contemplates murder. In one scene a row of five ninjas stands glued to a platform before the banquet table. When Macbeth tells them to sit, Weinstein rotates the platform to reveal the same five ninjas in a sitting position. The effect is cute and helps the play move very quickly.
Weinstein uses different voices to differentiate the characters, though not always consistently. The voice-acting is neither understated nor over-the-top. He points at the toy who is speaking, which is both subtle and effective. At other times, he even slides them “downstage” to deliver an aside. Some characters are picked up or slid around by Weinstein’s black-gloved hands, while others like Macduff are moved by magnets underneath the table, giving them an eerie, autonomous appearance. Nevertheless, because the puppeteer’s face was always visible, I sometimes found myself watching him speak the lines or create the sound effects, since the toys are naturally incapable of any expression or suggestive movement. Fortunately, his straightforward delivery was sometimes moving enough to make everyone stop smiling.
At 31 minutes, the performance was shorter than the subway ride to the theater. The play is able to move so quickly because there are no curtain or scene interruptions and the actors cross the stage almost instantaneously. Furthermore, Weinstein has cut nearly half the lines from the 1623 folio text, although the edits are so seamless that nothing appears to be missing. He skims quickly over the moments of slower development in order to highlight the more famous events and speeches. I wished the show went on longer, but Weinstein said that when it was uncut the play was too long to sustain the audience. Thus the artifice of having toys perform Macbeth is this production’s most unique and interesting aspect but also its main weakness. Seeing the action from a bird’s-eye-view reinforces the sense of human folly in the story, but it also makes it difficult to form an emotional connection to the individual characters. The show is delightfully funny, but with its tiny expressionless puppets and high-pitched voices, the play’s serious nature is sacrificed, and it never really rises above a brilliant farce.
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