Macbeth in the buff — why hadn’t anybody thought of it before?

The idea was as natural as …well, as Mickey Rooney turning to Judy Garland and bubbling “I know! Let’s set Shakespeare to music!” And Judy bubbling back “But lets do it in Swing!”

When a theater company in Arlington, Virginia decided to put on a Macbeth for the 21st Century, director Jose Carrasquillo wanted something tribal and violent, something suggestive of “an animal-like clan and society.”

“Twenty minutes,” decided the critic for the Washington City Paper. “That’s about how long it takes to get used to the nudity in José Carrasquillo’s eerie, intelligent, and visually arresting Macbeth.”

A tad more skittish about the balls-out production, with its cast of mostly male actors (give or take a few witches), was the reviewer for the A.P. wire service: “Folks in the front sometimes cringe and move back a few rows during intermission,” the scribe reported sheepishly. “One man watched the play with a programme in front of his eyes, blocking out the lower half of his field of vision.” (Awwwww, the poor fragile darling. What? Were all the showings of Evening sold out?)

“At no point are any of the actors covered, except for some mudlike makeup on their bodies,” the A.P continues, getting into — yes — the meat of the matter:

And all 10 performers remain on stage for the entire performance. The three witches, for example, crouch and scour and watch the action from the sidelines of the bare triangular stage, hissing their approval as the plot moves toward the vision they have foretold…

While Shakespeare has been subject to innumerable interpretations, and nudity is far from uncommon in theater, an all-nude production by a serious Shakespeare company is a rarity. Most reviews have not been favorable, particularly about the nudity. The Washington Post wrote that the lack of clothing lent an indistinguishable quality to the characters.

“Clothes remain primary signifiers of an individual’s place in a culture, so once apparel is cast aside, social boundaries become less clear,” reviewer Celia Wren wrote.

Glen Weldon of the Washington City Paper for the most part concurred, though he acknowledged the power of having all the actors naked and on the stage at all times: “The actors stand motionless in the gloom amid … towering, treelike totems. It’s an eerie and darkly beautiful effect, set off by … expressive lighting.” Still the absence of clothes, rather them making the work more sensational, had the very opposite effect: it dulled the sharp, jagged edges of its bloody murders and status competition.

…In the end, the nudity doesn’t make sense. On paper, doing away with the most conspicuous signifiers of the barrier separating Macbeth from the Witches underscores Macbeth’s complicity in his own fate.

But emotionally and dramatically, it doesn’t scan. Macbeth’s vaunting ambition may be a base, primal drive, but his self-awareness and frequently articulated guilt set him apart from beasts and the Witches and anyone else who’d walk around with his goolies all adangle.

The banquet scene, in which Lady Macbeth fights to keep up appearances while her husband wigs out in front of company, is all about maintaining propriety and avoiding suspicion — motivations that are precisely the opposite of primal.

Disputes over rank and title are at the heart of the play’s action, but without any visual manifestations of this hierarchy (and with the 10 actors switching in and out of the play’s 28 roles so often) the lines between characters blur to near obscurity.

And yet for all the carping, the stripped-to-the-skin Macbeth enjoyed — surprise — excellent box-office.

Perhaps it was because the actor playing Macbeth — Daniel Eichner, left — was more reminiscent of porn icon Al Parker than of an English Sir.

Or perhaps, it was one of those ultimate showdowns — the deathless lyricism of the Bard versus the immediacy of young, athletic, semi-tumescent (we can dream, can’t we) actors who somehow didn’t quite make it to that Broadway Bares bacchanalia.