A provocative 'Macbeth'

After its triumphant all-male production of "Titus Andronicus" at the end of last season, the Actors' Shakespeare Project announced that it would reverse the trick this year, with an all-female "Macbeth." Fortunately, as with "Titus," it quickly becomes clear in Adrianne Krstansky's impassioned and forceful staging that this is not a gimmick, but a way of inviting us to see a familiar tragedy in thought-provoking new ways.

The actresses, many of them regulars with Actors' Shakespeare, had a say in choosing Krstansky to direct them, and she has emphasized that she developed the production in collaboration with them. Perhaps that's why it feels remarkably coherent in its imagery and in its choice of themes to emphasize. As in any "Macbeth," there's blood aplenty, but it's the blood of childbirth and the blood that runs through families, not the blood shed in battle, that here seems central to the story.

Thus, for example, the mystery of Lady Macbeth's children - we know she has suckled at least one infant, and yet she now is childless - here becomes not a petty side inquiry but a potential key to her fierce ambition. Sound designer David Wilson subtly introduces a music-box lullaby under some of her cruelest speeches, and we see: Perhaps she's not a heartless monster, but a broken-hearted one.

Paula Plum, in a performance of outstanding variety and nuance, doesn't push this or any other idea too hard. Her Lady Macbeth is frightening when she should be, but frightened, too: longing to call up unseen powers but terrified when she succeeds. If she ends up in hell, we know that she's already been living painfully close to its gates for years.

Marya Lowry's Macbeth is a little harder to grapple with. Sometimes Lowry's voice sounds too breathy, and she rolls her eyes like a stallion at every moment of crisis (which, for Macbeth, is just about every moment of the play). Perhaps she wants to remind us that men can be at least as "hysterical" as women, but playing Macbeth at such a relentlessly headlong pitch robs him of whatever depth and complexity he may possess.

The other "male" roles provoke some interesting performances, notably Bobbie Steinbach's Duncan, an old and slightly eccentric ruler with the hair of Harpo Marx and the sly humor to match. Robin JaVonne Smith gives young Malcolm a fine nobility and verve, and Jacqui Parker's Banquo is everything he should be: a weary soldier, wary of prophecy and ambition, whose decency casts the power-hungry Macbeth in a nastier light. Sarah Newhouse pulls the neat trick of playing both man and wife, though her MacDuff could use a little more gravitas.

Even more interesting is what Krstansky makes of the witches. Too often they can border on goofy spookery or, worse, hostile mockery of old women. Here they have a wild, intoxicated, overtly sexual power that makes them both weirdly appealing and wickedly scary. Their intensely physical conjurations - writhing, shrieking, pulsing - evoke every primal scene from orgasm to childbirth to death, all with a particular, and particularly vivid, sense of the feminine nature of their strength. No wonder they scare the guys silly.

Costume designer Anna-Alisa Belous does an especially fine job with the eerily gleaming, crinkled robes that envelop these weird sisters, but she outfits the whole cast with a finely tuned balance of severity and style. Jeff Adelberg's lighting, too, enriches the atmosphere with a variety of striking but never self-aggrandizing effects, aided greatly by the flock of table lamps that Susan Zeeman Rogers deploys on the simple, adaptable platforms of her gloomily elegant set.

That set, like the "King Lear" that Actors' Shakespeare memorably staged in this same space a couple of years ago, must grapple with two giant columns and some other logistical challenges. But Krstansky makes the most of the awkwardness, keeping the actors moving along a central diagonal between two banks of audience seating so that our perspective, like the characters', is constantly changing. It feels off-kilter, unbalanced, as if the ground could shift at any moment beneath our feet. For a play where forests rise up and march, that's exactly right.

Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.