Devised and created by Parjad Sharifi, Nancy Tam, Molly March, Flo Barrett, Lois Anderson, Alex Ferguson, Alba Calvo, Camille Gingras, and Sean Marshall Jr. Directed by Steven Hill. A Leaky Heaven production. At the Russian Hall on Tuesday, March 25. Continues until March 30

Sometimes it feels like To Wear a Heart So White  is so in love with the eccentricity of its voice that it forgets to communicate.

In this 50-minute piece, director Steven Hill and his company revisit Shakespeare’s Macbeth while referencing European colonialism in the region now known as British Columbia. If you don’t already know the story of the Scottish thane who murdered King Duncan to ascend the throne and then had his best friend, Banquo, slaughtered to secure his reign, you’ll be screwed: To Wear a Heart So White doesn’t care a lot about narrative.

What it does care about is style. Occasionally, the formal exploration pays off—most notably in the play’s final few minutes. The audience is seated in the round, and when stagehands set the table for a banquet scene, some audience members find that they are guests. Macbeth and his lady, who have just become king and queen, party like it’s spring break, dancing in slow motion, and when they chow down, the grossness of their appetites is magnified by the slurping, burping, guttural soundscape. For his party trick, Macbeth performs “Out, out, brief candle”, a soliloquy about the meaninglessness of existence. As he speaks, he uses a bear rug, complete with stuffed head, as a kind of puppet. The bear’s mournful moans deepen the despair as images of clear-cut forests play behind them. And the point about soulless appetite, colonialism, and capitalism is made.

There are also successes earlier in the evening, but there are such big troughs between them that it’s hard to get on a roll with To Wear a Heart So White. The opening passage, in which we’re invited to church, weakly and obviously satirizes the role of Christianity in colonialism. And there’s an extended exchange in which three actors use stuffed birds to tell the story of a Coquitlam Days parade during which a bird—I think—stole a beauty queen’s crown. Okay, okay: a stolen crown. But where’s the payoff in this variation? Before Macbeth offs Duncan, Alex Ferguson and Lois Anderson, who play Lord and Lady Macbeth, lead two halves of the audience in out-of-sync journeys into hypnosis. On my side of the crowd, we envisioned going down lots of steps and opening a series of doors. When we finally reached our predictable destination, it was anticlimactic.

I’m interested in how stories are told. I also want to be consistently engaged.