I’ve just seen the first sketches of the set design for “Macbeth.”

I’d spent some time with my co-director, Aaron Posner, and the set designer, Dan Conway, explaining some magic stage masking principles, and offering a couple starting ideas on a design. Dan had brought in huge amounts of research material, and I’d left that meeting confident.

Sunday night, April 30, Dan emailed his first concept sketch to the design team. It’s everything I’ve dreamed of for the forty years I’ve been dreaming of “Macbeth.” It’s scenically stunning and perfect for the magic.

I can’t give out sketches yet, but I’ll give you a sense of it: Picture a curved wall of iron, twenty feet tall, with its top raked in at an distorting angle – Expressionist-style – and chopped off crudely, as if with a torch.

This wall is the semi-circular backdrop to the set. In front of it is a skeleton scaffolding of metal, forming an intricate two-story cage with a set of steps that sweeps down stage right. The bars of the cage have lines that shriek, evoking both prison cell and insane dead trees. The set suggests indoors, outdoors, a fortress, a grand ballroom, and a mental hospital all in one.

The sharp, twisted tops of the bars will look good with human heads impaled on them.

The set is also subtly designed to facilitate the necessary vanishes, apparitions, hallucinations, and bloodshed.

Mr. and Mrs. Bloody Macbeth, welcome home.

Teller

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