500 Clown Macbeth distills the theme of deadly ambition from the Shakespeare classic into three clowns atop an unstable scaffold. They reach fruitlessly for a crown hanging from the theater's ceiling and challenge the audience to be more than passive spectators. Director Leslie Buxbaum Danzig works well at building suspense as the clowns, while making precarious additions to their scaffold, come closer and ever more riskily closer to the desired crown, which is always just out of reach.
After you've been had in their suspense exercises, they give you a shock as their scaffold falls apart, and the actors take some rough-and-tumble falls. All the while, actors Molly Brennan (fueled with daft glee and sporting a hot-pink tutu), Adrian Danzig (with bulls-eye-colored hair), and Paul Kalina (who, among other stunts, explodes a huge balloon on his crotch) confront viewers, especially Kalina, who, besides pressuring audience members to slap his nearly-bald scalp hard, confiscated an audience member's ringing cellphone (at least in the show I saw) and hid it in his crotch at the audience's enlivening consternation. These clown antics and stunt-man daringness substitute, in the translation, for anything literary and so make Macbeth palatable to a TV-world.
