Because their opening night performance of “Macbeth” on Saturday at King’s Books had plenty of variety on scary: spine-chilling madness, eyes-wide violence, suspense and sheer evil.

And all this with a cast of ten and crew of three, several of whom are the same people.

SIPL’s style is Bard-with-a-twist, a Shakespeare with modern trappings but very Elizabethan in mobility and minimalism. As usual, this production travels through non-traditional spaces—a bookstore, a café, a beauty salon—with a bare-bones set, using whatever lighting and stage area is available. There’s multimedia, audience interaction and anything else you can think of to make Shakespeare more accessible.

Here, Duncan (Kristie Worthey) is President (not King) of Scotland, and—announcing Malcolm as her successor—opens a can of worms as senators Macbeth (Christopher Cantrell,) Macduff (Michael Christopher) and Banquo (Gene Bankhead) sort out allegiances. After Macbeth assassinates Duncan at the urging of Lady Macbeth (Samantha Underwood,) the trail of blood begins.

Yet in this “Macbeth,” it’s the acting itself that takes the play out of the script and into your gut. Cantrell, who won Alec Clayton’s informal “best actor” award for this title role at the Olympia Little Theatre a couple of years ago, takes the murderous senator from a tall, confident, honest statesman to a violent monster in a fascinating journey, marred only by a lot of hurried, not-quite-intelligible lines. Underwood plays a Lady Macbeth wide-eyed in madness; they fit together superbly, with some powerful scenes of sexual violence that marry fear and lust in perfect symbolism.

Bankhead, interestingly, makes a far more effective Banquo as ghost than alive, casting aside the nerdy glasses and, disheveled and bloody from his murder, assuming a terrifically chilling smile. As Macduff, Michael Christopher’s slick-smile movie-star look soon takes on gritty strength; the final face-off with adversary Macbeth is as strong as you’ll get anywhere.

Other roles, as is usual with an amateur group like SIPL, aren’t so inspiringly declaimed, and there were a few tech glitches. The decision to put the three major murders behind a backlit screen was unfortunate: shadow plays always seem one-dimensional, and the one onstage murder scene was, in fact, much more horrifying. Sound was occasionally too loud, always irritating. And while lighting is pretty much how it comes at the venue, the show needed the magic of some more total darks.

Still, director Kristie Worthey marries Shakespearean stagecraft with multimedia extremely well: clever cell phone soliloquies and presidential photo opportunities fold into ritual witches’ dances and stunning medieval masks. And Lady Macbeth’s “out, out, damn spot” scene, done tearful and trembling by Underwood, twisted into an ingenious and totally believable ending.

No, it’s not high-tech theater. No, it’s not professional theater. But it’s the only theater daring to do Shakespeare in this town, and doing it fringe, too. And for seasonal scariness, you couldn’t do better.

Rosemary Ponnekanti: 253-597-8568; rosemary.ponnekanti@thenewstribune.com