This show had the bones of something really interesting. Taking Lady Macbeth, famously wanting to be “unsex”ed, and making her a modern working woman with edometriosis and a hysterectomy was compelling and could’ve become something really interesting.

Unfortunately, this character didn’t feel like Lady Macbeth at all. I love an adaptation that isn’t afraid to make changes, but something needs to remain recognizable for the work to be an adaptation instead of an original work. This Lady Macbeth had almost no ambition or backbone, spending most of the play being acted upon with little agency of her own. Macbeth held all of the power in the relationship. I actually think this would’ve worked much better as an original work, as the references to Macbeth were shallow at best and only reminded me of their poor integration.

This play was acted by a solo performer on stage, with other characters acted via video recordings. Conversations between Lady Macbeth and others were sometimes awkward, as the timing wasn’t always correct and left gaps where we waited for the video actor to respond. Each video seemed to slow down the pace of the play and break any building tension. At some point I dreaded seeing Lady Macbeth disappear behind her changing curtain, because I knew it meant yet another interlude of recorded video, sometimes more than one in a row.

That said, what was a pretty slow and uninteresting play picked up at the end. Lady Macbeth’s final monologue, lit by the cold gaze of a ring light and a phone, was the highlight of the show. The writing and the performance were both great here. The final line, especially, was such a gut punch. Had they moved the video montage afterwards to another earlier part in the play, and ended on that line, I could’ve given this a higher rating.