By JEFFREY DAY
Staff Writer


Last year, a small theater company became the big hit of the Piccolo Spoleto Festival, the little festival that runs in concert with the vaunted Spoleto Festival USA.

Tiny Ninja Theatre of Brooklyn, N.Y., packed Theatre 99 with, oh, 18 to 22 people for each performance of "Macbeth."

It was "Macbeth" as one had never before seen the Shakespearean tragedy: performed on a briefcase-sized stage by a dozen 2-inch-tall plastic ninja figures as well as Mr. and Mrs. Smile, small figures with large smiley face heads, in the roles of Lord and Lady Macbeth.

The audience was on the edge of its collective seat, or rather, on the edge of a slightly too narrow board propped on the arms of theater chairs, watching bloody tragedy unfold through tiny red binoculars.

Tiny Ninja returns to Charleston for the world premiere of its production of Shakespeare's other too-often-produced-everyone-dies-at-the-end play, "Romeo and Juliet."

Director and founder Dov Weinstein spoke about the production a few days before loading up cast, sets and crew for the trip South.

About the new cast:

"Mr. and Mrs. Smile are as good a team as you can find, but they felt we should go with some younger actors. Mrs. Smile will play the role of the nurse. Mr. Smile is not appearing, but has spent some time working with the young leads.

"There will be many, many ninjas in various roles. Not only are they very good performers - and not to disparage others in the field - but they are, as one would expect from ninjas, extremely disciplined."

About suggestions that because the actors have only one facial expression and cannot move their arms or legs, they seem rather wooden:

"I've never heard that. Your review last year certainly didn't say that. Yes, their tiny arms and legs are frozen, but if you look at theories of art and performance much, it speaks to trying to distill and essentialize the action, to take something complicated and diffuse and make it very precise. Many actors have a lot of tics and vocal intonations. With ninjas, we do away with those distractions."

Do any of the actors get lost or pocketed by overzealous fans?

"The ninjas, as I've said, are very disciplined and therefore not likely to wander off on their own. Sometimes people have wanted to take them home, but after seeing one of the plays, they respect them as performers."

On touring with the ninjas:

"The show is surprisingly large for how small it is; all those tables and lights and wigs. We are able to travel the entire production under my allowable-luggage limits for international flights.

"With the increase in airline security, the ninjas do have to be checked, because of course, each has a tiny plastic sword."