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.