Notes for and against Macbeth 2008, directed by Grzegorz Jarzyna, hailed by some as a theater visionary:

I think the avant-garde Polish director should have given his contemporary take on Shakespeare’s tragedy a different title.

Throne of Blood, Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 masterpiece, is famously based on Macbeth, but its title takes us directly into another world. Set in medieval Japan, the movie uses very little of Shakespeare’s language. Mr. Jarzyna’s Macbeth 2008, which has been compared to watching a movie onstage, is set in a blood-soaked U.S. war zone, and the director rarely uses Shakespeare’s language either. But his title links this production too closely to the original play, and sets up unfounded expectations.

Warning: Macbeth 2008 has practically nothing in common with Shakespeare’s Macbeth—save for the gruesome story. In that sense, it’s a new play.

Shakespeare cheerfully stole his story lines from other writers, of course. The primary source of his Macbeth is Holinshed’s Chronicles, while you could say the primary source of Mr. Jarzyna’s is Shakespeare.

MACBETH 2008 BEGINS in darkness at 9 p.m., and the darkness of monstrous sleepless nightmares is its apt signature. I’m unpersuaded by Stephen Greenblatt’s argument in the current New York Review of Books that productions of Macbeth ought to reveal the consoling possibility, suggested occasionally in the text, of redemptive light and hope—the better to appreciate the play’s descent into unredeemed evil. It’s like asking us to remember President Mugabe’s inner kindness.

No, the ruling note of any Macbeth must be hellish darkness through which light can never break. (“The night is long that never finds the day.”)

Mr. Jarzyna’s tragedy of diabolic evil and the intoxication of power is staged in the spectacular setting of a theater specially built in the ruins of Brooklyn’s roofless tobacco factory across the way from St. Ann’s Warehouse (which brought us the ambitious production). Supertitles are beamed on to two walls of the Macbeth 2008 set, and headphones provide a sensory soundscape of music and the actors’ voices, which only partially drowns the drone of traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge close by.

It’s an unnerving, beautiful place to watch the drama unfold, and for Mr. Jarzyna’s purposes, the American flag flying proudly and coincidentally on the Bridge is part of the set. We watch the play from bleachers overlooking a two-story concrete building with various rooms. The opening scene establishes the grisly tone like a scene from a war movie:

A busy army command center is seen on the upper floor, while below Muslims appear to be praying in the shadows of a mosque. Major Macbeth—of the 1st Scottish Airborne, if you please—disobeys General Duncan’s orders to abort a dangerous mission and heroically attacks an unspecified target. (We assume it to be in Iraq.)

This is a Macbeth who will need little persuading from Mrs. Macbeth to become a butcher in order to advance up the ranks. He gleefully kills a Muslim we saw at prayer and hacks off his head.

Enter a veiled Hecate. The production has one witch, not three, and she’s a Muslim who’ll later reveal herself as a seductive, beautifully bald witch in a miniskirt.

Mr. Jarzyna’s choices can be a wee bit hit and miss. Is his Macbeth a Scotsman or an American? It isn’t clear; nor is the country we’re in. Is it Scotland or Iraq (or both)? If the narrative of Mr. Jarzyna’s Middle East Macbeth is mushy, his broad political message is clear. The coarse troops sometimes speak in American accents; an early, pro-forma orgy scene among them involves a female Elvis impersonator; the later pre-banquet scene has a sequined Uncle Sam as a master of ceremonies performing magic tricks (not very impressive ones, I must say).

The director has far better tricks up his sleeve. The simply staged banquet scene works brilliantly, like a possession scene out of The Exorcist. The ghost of butchered Banquo appears startlingly naked (except for his army boots). I’ve never before imagined a naked ghost, even in bad dreams. Such ghosts walk into gas chambers, wrote Milan Kundera, where “nudity is a shroud.”

Aleksandra Konieczna brings Lady Macbeth into sharper focus than I’ve seen of late. She plays her as an unapologetically ambitious killer in a state of steely delirium and sexual ecstasy (along with a loopy touch of Amy Winehouse). Following Duncan’s bloody murder, her frantic fuck with Cezary Kosinski’s ravenous, psychopathic Macbeth slamming her up against the glass door of the Coke-filled fridge seems only right under the circumstances. (The recent Patrick Stewart Macbeth, directed by Rupert Goold, lacked any such erotic charge.)

Better still—the scene with the Macbeths calmly drinking tea together while standing nonchalantly in a pool of blood is laughably appropriate. No image of them could convince us more effectively of their hideous shallowness.

The sight of the sleepwalking Mrs. Macbeth peeing in terror onstage isn’t innovatory, however. It was done years ago during a touring production of a notorious Macbeth in England and gave new meaning to all that hand washing.

And then there’s the giant bunny rabbit.

As the fanciable bald witch rants overhead, an actor appears suddenly as a white rabbit, projected onto a massive video screen. A bunny wabbit is wunning wild. Scholarly research has enabled me to crack its mysterious appearance:

In my opinion, it all goes back to Harvey (1950), but it’s also clear that Grzegorz Jarzyna is influenced by more recent American pop culture. For example, Richard Kelly’s cult movie Donnie Darko (2001) has a large manipulative bunny who encourages a hallucinating troubled teen to commit crimes. Mr. Jarzyna’s big hero, though, is David Lynch.

The cry of “Silencio!” in Macbeth 2008 is his tribute to Mulholland Drive. More to the point, Inland Empire (2006), which Mr. Lynch shot mostly in Lódz, Poland, involves a disturbed Polish woman watching a TV sitcom about three rabbit people, which is actually an extract from Mr. Lynch’s lesser-known Rabbits (2002).

So now you know.

The important thing is the giant rabbit in Macbeth 2008 is plain silliness (unless, that is, you’re a David Lynch fan). Among other movie references: the helicopter sequence and rescue that brings Macbeth’s reign of terror to an end is an inevitably unimpressive mini-version of an action movie such as Black Hawk Down.

It’s cool for avant-garde theater directors to keep borrowing from movies, I guess. Any old film will do. Mr. Goold’s acclaimed Macbeth tried to duplicate the visual effects of Kubrick movies and cheap slasher flicks. Mr. Jarzyna’s Macbeth 2008 is in the same imitative spirit.

This is the way theater will end—not with a bang, but with a movie onstage and a video game. It’s only when theater believes honestly in its own uniqueness that it can truly thrive.

Macbeth 2008 has its moments, even so—not least the staging of its convulsive last image that owes nothing to movies, second rate or otherwise, and everything to inspired imagination. Grzegorz Jarzyna takes us to the rotten heart of Shakespeare’s original tragedy when his cursed Macbeth is killed. We’re left with the pitiless sight of Macduff and Malcolm rolling with uncontrollable laughter at Macbeth’s severed head.

You don’t forget laughter like that. It comes from a void.

jheilpern@observer.com