Macbeth says absolutely gorgeous stuff. He is a fountain of incomparable poetry. He's also an assassin. He's a multiple assassin, actually, a serial assassin. One thing just leads to another.

Macbeth is not an easy role for an actor: exquisite one moment, barbaric the next. Though I've seen a dozen or so productions of Macbeth, I've never seen anyone solve the Macbeth sensibility dilemma as neatly as James Marsters does in the current Seattle Shakespeare Festival production.

In the title role, Marsters is obviously thinking all the time. He is passionate in a brooding way. He doesn't just babble the infinitely famous verses ("Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," "My way of life is fallen into the sear, the yellow leaf; and that which should accompany old age, as honor, love, obedience, troops of friends, I must not look to have" and so on.)

Marsters seems always to be searching for just the right word, slowly, painstakingly. It becomes a sort of decadence, as if Macbeth cares more about words than people.

His political ambitions are sensationally ruthless. In this interpretation, the contradiction between ruthlessness and estheticism dissolves. It is because Macbeth is such a self-absorbed connoisseur of his own sensations and desires that he is oblivious to ordinary social and emotional realities.

Kate Myre, as Macbeth's wife, provides an excellent complement to Marster's monster of egotism. She knows how to manipulate her mate's self-aggrandizing temperament, now with shame, now with flattery, always with an astute assessment of hypersensitive vanity. The fact that Myre is taller than Marsters adds a fortunate visual detail in this regard.

Like Marsters, Myre has a special aptitude for thinking out loud and thereby turning ornate Renaissance verse into a form of psychic X-ray.

Director Terry Edward Moore gives his show a dark, primitive look with the help of set designer Tobin Alexandra-Young, costume designer Ron Erickson and lighting designer Walter Kilmer. Sound designer Lucy Peckham cues in eerie noises.

Like many a Macbeth director, Moore has trouble figuring out exactly what to do with those pesky witches that are a fixture of Shakespeare's idea of 11th-century Scotland. Macbeth is limitlessly ambitious. The witches can be no more than the equivalent of contemporary pollsters who provide pretexts for unconscionable acts. Or, the witches can be supernatural supervillains, who take possession of an otherwise OK guy and turn him into a monster.

Marsters does an excellent job with a purely psychological tragedy. But Moore stages the witch scenes with full honors, as if they were the true motor of Macbeth's downfall.

The full-honors approach generally requires some awesome special effects - holograms and lasers and trapdoors and whatnot - that are way beyond the festival's budget. When the witch's boss, Hecate, shows up, the scene turns mildly ludicrous, like an elementary school Halloween house of horrors tableau. Most low-budget Macbeths do without the Hecate scene, for good reason.

On the mundane terrestrial level, Moore gets effective performances from a host of supporting players, including Reginald Jackson as one of Macbeth's opponents, Stephen Lennstrom as Macbeth's youngest victim and David Baxter as the clowning porter who provides the transition between crime and punishment.

This porter role is often either insufferable or incomprehensible or both. Baxter actually manages to provide what is technically necessary: comic relief.

This Macbeth runs in rotating repertory at the Ethnic Cultural Theatre with the festival's other production, Twelfth Night. Both shows are definitely worth seeing. Macbeth fans, however, may be disappointed in their effort to get tickets. Most performances are sold out. A Saturday matinee has been added, however, to accommodate the demand for seats