There’s a great Canadian TV show called Slings and Arrows about the backstage sound and fury at a fictitious Shakespeare company. In one memorable episode, the director of a troubled production of MacBeth — and theatrical superstition holds that there can be no other kind — tries to turn things around by making the blowhard actor he’s been forced to cast in the title role perform his first scene with Lady MacBeth in the nude.

For the Washington Shakespeare Company’s current production of the spooky, spectral Scottish tragedy, director Jose Carrasquillo has gone one better: His ten-person company perform the whole of the show au naturel. While this tactic mightn’t hurt the buzz or the box office any, it’s an artistically legit call that in the context of this spare, expressionistic, intermittently thrilling production, seems neither exploitive nor sensationalistic. Carrasquillo wants to conjure up a primitive world wherein threats both natural and supernatural are everywhere — how to do this more efficiently than to deprive his players of their most basic layer of defense from the elements? Grooming, too, is a luxury of which the cast has been stripped. Eye of newt, toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog; we see it all, and if anyone felt compelled by vanity to “put on manly readiness” at the gym, they’ve resisted the urge.

Thus the nudity is the opposite of titillating, and a piece of the show’s striking visual motif: anthropomorphic trees (designed by Giorgos Tsappas and sculpted Marie Schneggenburger) surround an elevated triangular platform with a hole cut it in to represent a pond downstage. Ayun Fedorcha’s lighting design is dim and atmospheric, contributing to the air of menace. Despite the minimalist aesthetic here — the actors don’t even have swords, though we do see the severed head at the end, weirdly — twice as many of those freaky trees would have been twice as good.

In another cool conceit, the ensemble remains onstage throughout the show. Actors not in the current scene become living pieces both of the set and of the soundscape, prowling and howling in the background like beasts or spirits. (Acting students, take heart — there was a point to all those silly animal pantomimes you had to do after all!) It’s all suitably eerie, which makes it all the more disappointing when Kathleen Akerley’s Lady MacBeth turns out to be a benign temptress: you’d think she was trying to convince her husband to take out the trash, not bump off King Duncan (WSC artistic director Christopher Henley) and usurp his throne.

Part of the problem could be the doubling of parts: Akerley is also Hecate, queen of the witches, and in the scene where she lashes out at the three weird sisters (played with feral intensity by Manshu Chang, Heather Haney, and Ashley Robinson; they’re easily the best thing about the show), she finds the venom so notably absent from most of her scenes as Lady MacBeth. While one wishes Carrasqullo had exempted Lady MacBeth from double-casting, in other instances, it's surprisingly effective — you’d think you’d be lost with no costumes to cue us when an actor has changed roles, but it’s never a problem. When Haney transforms from a terrified messenger boy into a lupine creature of the night, the speed and totality of the change is stunning.

As the titular object of all this persuasion, Daniel Eichner is never less than watchable and sometimes mesmerizing. If he seems a bit young and, frankly, scrawny for us to buy him as a decorated general in the early scenes, that just makes it more believable when ambition quickly overtakes him.

At close to two-and-a-half hours, this take on one of Shakespeare’s shortest plays overstays its welcome, though it isn’t obvious where the padding lies. The too-lengthy intermission is a mood-killer, though this may be a practical matter mandated by the small number of toilets available at the Clark Street Playhouse.

Hey, we told you: this is the earthy, raw, dirty MacBeth. It’s flawed, certainly, but you still walk out knowing you’ve seen something “bloody, bold, and resolute.”

MacBeth is at the Clark Street Playhouse through July 15th. Tickets are available online.