“Be not lost so poorly in your thoughts,” Lady Macbeth hisses at her treacherous, guilt-ridden husband in the second act of the tragedy that bears their name. Fat chance of that. Macbeth is full of dangerous people carried away by contemplation, brooding about what they’ve done and worrying about the consequences of what they intend to do. Even when they share the stage with others, the characters in William Shakespeare’s spookiest play are often talking to themselves. To amplify these expressions of interiority — and impart a little seasonal chill — the Shakespeare specialists in The Curtain have circled the stage at the Nimbus Arts Center (329 Warren St.) with electric candles.  Besides looking cool, the ring marks the parameters of the plotters’ paranoid minds. This glowing hoop, augmented a bit (but just a bit) by the Nimbus stagelights, is all the illumination you’re going to get at Macbeth, which will run at the theater in the Powerhouse Arts District until Nov. 3. It’s a testament to the ingenuity and resourcefulness of Curtain director and Shakespeare true believer Sean Hagerty that the the gloom never becomes tiresome. Instead, it suits the material. The flickering shadows feel pregnant with ill portents, anxieties, and intimations of savagery to come.Last year’s Curtain production of Romeo and Juliet didn’t have much of a set. Macbeth is even sparser. There are barely any props at all: a few swords and knives for the butchering, an empty cradle meant to symbolize the loss of Lady Macbeth’s infant child, a banquet table haunted by Banquo, and the ring of candles that changes hue according to the emotional weather onstage. (The Weïrd Sisters conduct their bubbling and troubling from within a cauldron-circle of sickly green.) The costumes feel anachronistic — more suggestive of continental armies than feuding Scottish warlords. But dress and scenery and verisimilitude in general are things that are, for Hagerty, far secondary to the words. His stripped-down direction and oversight demonstrates tremendous faith in William Shakespeare: his language, his plots, his characters, his ability to reach through time and communicate something to a contemporary audience.The character of Macbeth is attractive to traditionalist directors because his tragic flaw — an insatiable hunger for power and authority — feels timeless. He spends much of the play tormented by his ambition, by his fear of getting caught, and by blood on his hands that he can’t seem to wash out. It’s tempting to see a little Macbeth in any leader who cuts corners and behaves ruthlessly in order to get ahead and, we imagine, may be ambivalent about it behind closed doors. But Macbeth is also a drama with a specific historical setting that’s constantly referred to in the script: Celtic Scotland, at a time when a lord could commit murder without the fear of legal repercussions. This lawlessness is what makes Macbeth so volatile. The lords can only be held in check by threat, muscle, and steel. It stands to reason that a Scottish king would cut an imposing figure. This is not the way that Jamie Ballard approaches the role. Ballard, a skilled and experienced Shakespearean actor making his American stage debut, is slight and not particularly strong-voiced. He is unconvincing as a man of war, but he makes up for a charisma deficit by reframing Macbeth as a medieval version of a conniving politician. Ballard’s Macbeth is constantly scanning the horizon for threats, engaging in misdirection, and lying his way, bloodily, to the top. When he manipulates the crowd of nobles, he does so in the practiced cadences of a skilled dissembler. His undoing isn’t his overreach — it’s his inability to maintain the masquerade once his ragged conscience catches up to him.The same can be said for Lady Macbeth, played with lethal intensity, icy grace, and flashes of ironic humor by the excellent Christianna Nelson, who returns to The Curtain after a strong turn as the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet. Often misunderstood as an orchestrator forcing her husband’s hand, she and he are like-minded seditionists from the start. They are a Highlander power couple seizing initiative in Lowland society; they’re accomplices straight through the play, egging each other on and absolving each other’s heinous acts.The truest tragedy for the audience is that Lady Macbeth practically vanishes from the back half of the play, robbing Macbeth of its most compelling character — an ambitious, wounded woman navigating a man’s world with every trick at her limited disposal. The real bubbling cauldron is the Lady’s ferocious desire for more than what she has, and Nelson knows when to stir it, when to let it simmer and when to turn up the heat until the poisonous mixture spills over the sides.Without Lady Macbeth and Nelson in the middle of the story, Macbeth and Ballard must carry the late-act drama. He gets some help from Aria Shahgasemi — last year’s Romeo — as the vengeful, righteous MacDuff, and Jonathan Crimeni, who plays crown heir Malcolm with a tight combination of mercurial insecurity and regal propriety. Weïrd Sisters Emma Kantor, Priyanka Kedia, and Gilda Mercado undermine the regimented, muscle-bound sphere of masculine hierarchy with some enjoyable girly chaos whenever they appear. Clear-voiced Cooper Grodin’s ghost-Banquo bears himself with the chest-forward aggression that we might have expected from Macbeth himself. And maybe that is Hagerty’s (and Ballard’s) point. The crown never fits comfortably on Macbeth’s head. It’s fun to see Ballard squirm as he tries to assume a throne that feels more like a hot seat with each passing scene. But the trouble with portraying Macbeth as a weasel rather than a brute is that it undercuts the ambiguity of the drama. This is a deeply evil person we’re watching: he disposes of his own king, betrays his nation, and backstabs his friends. He even puts a child to the sword. If there’s no dark glamor to what he’s doing — if he’s a sleazy social climber rather than a brooding antihero — then he’s just despicable, and we can’t wait for him to get his comeuppance. We’re never given a chance to identify with this character and recognize the dangerous parts of our personalities that his behavior reflects. We’re aren’t frightened by him, and that means we aren’t frightened by ourselves. Ballard’s turn is nuanced, and smart, but it lets the audience off the hook.It’s worth acknowledging that despite the candlelight trickery that bestows a hallucinatory shimmer to these scenes, this isn’t a particularly supernatural version of Macbeth. The ghost of Banquo exists in Macbeth’s fevered mind only. Lady Macbeth’s mental breakdown is prompted by her guilt and her tragic backstory. Even the Weïrd Sisters seem more subversive than magical; much of their power over the minds of others, it’s implied, is mere sound and fury. It’s likely that William Shakespeare, who wasn’t much given to arcana, meant for us to understand the horror in Macbeth as psychological rather than paranormal. His play is one of the first examples of a genre that has since become very popular: the glimpse inside the mind of a killer. Macbeth, like many of Shakespeare’s works, is conservative. It was designed to reassure King James that the insurrectionists behind the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 were irredeemable monsters. Copycats would be unsuccessful, usurpers would be foiled, and the Stuart bloodline would be preserved. James, who believed himself to be a descendent of the real Banquo, would have gotten the message loud and clear. Shakespeare (and the King) might not have wanted us to see Macbeth and his Lady as true threats to the royal line. But this play hasn’t stuck in the theatrical canon because we’re monarchist sympathizers. Its persistence has been driven by that shiver we feel when we witness the machinations of regicide, and entertain the possibility, in spite of our civilized notions, that the crown belongs to he, or she, who is ruthless enough to take it.    The post The Curtain and Macbeth Haunt Nimbus Arts Center appeared first on Jersey City Times.