Evil: The word is being thrown about quite freely during this presidential election year, with followers of each major party candidate employing it to characterize the other. But, if you ask actor and playwright Patrick Page, William Shakespeare would not approve.

For “evil” gives the impression of some kind of supernatural force that exists outside people, its power tapped into like a live electrical wire they’ve touched. Or it’s portrayed as some kind of incurable condition for the perpetrator. But Shakespeare’s creations made clear that doing something hurtful or destructive is always a personal choice.

Page makes this point brilliantly in a solo show called “All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain.” It’s not a perfect title, for villains have been with us always. What the Bard did was reinvent how we view evil, fleshing out the murderous and deceptive and showing them to be complex, conflicted and sometimes consumed with uncertainty and remorse.

“All the Devils are Here” has set down stakes on the Guthrie Theater’s Proscenium Stage for a month, and it’s not only a riveting demonstration of the exquisite skills of both Shakespeare and one of America’s great Shakespearean actors — a regular at Washington, D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre Company and San Diego’s Old Globe — but might serve as a particularly insightful lens through which to view this year’s election.

In presentation style, the show has much in common with “On Beckett,” Bill Irwin’s solo show on the Irish writer, Samuel Beckett, which was offered on the same stage last spring. Similarly, it’s an eloquent examination of how a particular writer imaginatively altered his art form. Like Irwin, Page uses minimal props and costuming, but makes a far more entertaining and incisive case for his chosen author’s brand of humanism.

The journey is from one scene of a Shakespeare play to another, and Page has chosen to portray key villains from the playwright’s oeuvre in chronological order, starting with Richard III and continuing through Macbeth. Page dubs the 21 years between them as “raising the villain from infancy to adulthood.”

The actor emphasizes seven characters along the way, and you should already have grasped the central point of this set of scenes after experiencing Page’s breathtaking take on Shylock from “The Merchant of Venice.” Created at a time when anti-semitism was part of the water that Europe was swimming in, Shakespeare and Page team up to present a man angrily arguing for his own humanity and seeking vengeance for the bigotry he’s endured.

That’s but one of many motivations and internal struggles the author and actor identify to inspire an audience’s understanding and compassion, from the conscience-wracked Claudius in “Hamlet” to the ghosts of guilt that haunt Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, Page portraying both grippingly.

But if you long to see a genius Shakespearean actor at work, the performance’s peak comes during the dialogue between Othello and Iago in which the latter plants and waters the seeds of jealousy. Never does the disarmingly naturalistic Page give you the sense that Iago is a duplicitous man, instead making him seem to have another’s interests at heart. Meanwhile, listeners are best served by employing some skepticism. Yet another valuable lesson for election time.

‘All the Devils are Here’

When: Through Nov. 17

Where: Guthrie Theater Proscenium, 818 Second St. S., Mpls.

Tickets: $83-$16.50, available at 612-377-2224 or guthrietheater.org

Capsule: Patrick Page offers a captivating look at the nature of evil.

Rob Hubbard can be reached at wordhub@yahoo.com.

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