For the next four nights, the legendary Macbeth, long-deceased high king of Scotland, will stride about Woolly Mammoth Theatre's stage with Homer Simpson and Barack Obama.
MacHomer, the 70-minute solo show that Rick Miller, a Canadian actor, has been performing on and off for the past 13 years, is always a delightfully bizarre concoction. Only Miller would bring audiences the Bard's spooky, 11th-century tale of murder and ambition as narrated by more than 50 characters from The Simpsons.
Surely no one before or after Simpson has posed that immortal question: "Is that a dagger which I see before me, or a slice of pizza?"
And given that Miller is performing in Washington, a city obsessed with politics, less than four weeks before the presidential election, well, let's just say that Obama and John McCain might unwittingly put in surprise appearances.
"There are six or seven times in every show when I improvise and talk about the political and social issues of the day," says Miller, 38. "I might just have to throw in a few little comments on the upcoming election, which we in Canada are following very closely."
Members of the public have been voting with their wallets since 1995, when Miller first brought the skit he had created for a cast party to a paying audience at the Montreal Fringe Festival.
"It was a humble little joke that turned into something more," he says. "At first, it was more of a comedy sketch than a play, but I'd hit upon an idea that worked. Both the Simpsons and the Scots are these great, big, dysfunctional families. It's kind of like a Simpsons' Halloween episode where the characters are taken out of context and allowed to murder one another."
In MacHomer, Homer plays the title character, while Marge is Lady Macbeth. Barney, the big, drunken barfly, is Macduff, the hero of the Bard's tragedy. Ned Flanders is Banquo, Macbeth's murdered-friend-turned-ghost, while Krusty the Clown is the drunken Porter.
Mind you, Shakespeare's play lists 27 characters. In Miller's script, they are "played" by more than four dozen residents of Springfield.
"I made a lot of very subjective casting decisions," Miller says. "I couldn't bear to leave anyone out."
Though Miller voices The Simpsons' characters in their own imitable tones, roughly three-quarters of the dialogue is Shakespeare's, and the show encompasses about half of the scenes in the original.
