Yolanda Stange as Lady Helen Macduff (right) and Bobby Cody as Finlay Macbeth in Plan-B’s production of Melissa Leilani Larson’s Bitter Lemon. Image by Sharah Meservy.

If you value intelligent theatre that has a bite, don’t miss Bitter Lemon, Plan-B’s marvelous season-ending one-act production in the Rose Wagner Studio Theatre through April 28^th. I’d see this riff on Macbeth again in a heartbeat, and surely would get as much joy out of a second viewing as I did on Friday evening. It helps to retain some familiarity with the plot of Shakespeare’s play, but isn’t essential.

The wonderfully matched Finlay Macbeth (Bobby Cody), in a killer ecru menswear suit, and Lady Helen Macduff (Yolanda Stange), wearing a full-skirted hers’ suit in a fetching scarlet (costumes by Victoria Bird), trade richly written acerbic jabs while waiting in a kind of purgatory for we-never-do-find-out-precisely-what. But the play’s the thing, of course, and given that the Lady has but 19 lines in the original Scottish Play, she is granted a considerable dialogue extension by Melissa Leilani Larson, a playwright based in Salt Lake City whose award-winning work has been seen on five continents, including six world premieres for Plan-B Theatre. Larson holds a BA in English from BYU and an MFA from the Iowa Playwrights Workshop. She tells us in a confessional-type piece online that she does not like Macbeth. Or his wife, for that matter. But the woman sure can write for the Thane of Cawdor. Brilliantly. And for Lady Helen. “I’ve always wondered what would happen if Lady Macduff had her say,” says the playwright.

This represents a “sort of” world premiere because in 2019 Creekside Theatre Fest, in Cedar Hills, Utah, commissioned and produced Bitter Lemon. It was an unusual production as each performance involved a new cast that hadn’t seen the script previously, performing with scripts-in-hand.

Not so with Plan-B. For one thing, artistic director Jerry Rapier directs and you just can’t ever go wrong there. He always gets it and sees that his players do. He’s ably assisted by a wonderful crew: Victoria Bird (costume design), Emma Belnap (lighting), Janice Chan (scenic design), Cheryl Ann Cluff (sound design), Taylor Wallace (stage manager), Liz Whittaker (intimacy director), David Knoell (scenic builder and electrician) and Asano Swenson (show art).

Yolanda Stange as Lady Helen Macduff (left) and Bobby Cody as Finlay Macbeth in Plan-B’s production of Melissa Leilani Larson’s Bitter Lemon. Image by Sharah Meservy.

Bitter Lemon, Plan-B Theatre, Salt Lake City, though April 28
Thursdays @ 8 p.m.; Fridays @ 8 p.m.; Saturdays @ 4 p.m.; Sensory friendly April 20; Sundays @ 2 p.m. 60 minutes, no intermission. No late seating.

Ann Poore

A graduate of the University of Utah, Ann Poore is a freelance writer and editor who spent most of her career at The Salt Lake Tribune. She was the 2018 recipient of the Salt Lake City Mayor’s Artist Award in the Literary Arts.