Why Macbeth is Shakespeare's most challenging play (for directors)

Barker Community Playhouse, in Providence, calling itself America's oldest community theater (maybe so), performs "Macbeth," and does a pretty good job with it. Honestly, you're not going to get the Royal Shakespeare or Orson Welles in a community theater, but we're lucky to get a solid and serious production of this great play that so few amateur companies would ever fathom, both because of the superstitions that surround it and for the daunting challenges of production: how do you handle the multiple scenes and settings, the need for a castle and a battlefield, a moving forest, a blasted heath, ghosts and visions, the weird sisters, the battles and the hand-to-hand conflict, all that blood and gore, and most of all the incredibly stark and unstable mental status of the two leads, Macbeth and Lady M? Tough for any theater, perhaps a play that presupposed the possibilities of film - and a real challenge for a small theater with basically no backstage space. That all said, the leads were competent or better (Lady M. the best), and though the stage gestures were awkward and melodramatic at times (I hated Macbeth's kneeling through "Tomorrow and tomorrow...," some were nicely understated, such as the great Macduff scene or imaginative - the 3 witch scene in which the sisters mouthed the prophecies as ghostly voice spoke the words through the sound system. Iconic lit prof from SUNYAB Lionel Abel used to say the Macbeth was Shakespeare's only true tragedy, which I think is kind of absurd, but seeing the play live reminds that it is no doubt his most intense and psychologically focused tragedy and still evokes pity and terror - I had thought it could not be done in contemporary setting (this production was in period), but perhaps it could be set right in the corporate hq of Enron or Citibank?