But no less horrible than the violent clangor of metal against metal or the startling blaze of white against the sky is the spectacle of a man becoming evil before our eyes. That's the story of Macbeth, which opened the Shakespeare Festival at Lake Eola Park Wednesday night, and that's the chilling vision that actor Joseph Culliton presents in the festival's Macbeth - a nightmarish vision of strength turned sour.

Directed by Stephen J. Hollis, this unsettling production lives up to the performance of its lead actor in almost every way. Hollis delivers not only the crowd-pleasing, horror movie blood and guts of Macbeth - the ghastliness of its chanting witches, its grisly murders, its warfare - but also the clashing emotions at the tragedy's heart, the conflict between right and wrong. It's a production of consequence, one that makes this second festival a welcome event.

Experience has proved a friend to the festival in several ways. Its technical staff has figured out the vagaries of the inadequate lighting and sound systems at Lake Eola's Walt Disney Amphitheater and has added enough equipment to make the lighting just fine and the sound satisfactory most of the time. Its 20-member cast, made up of performers auditioned in Orlando, Atlanta and New York, includes several with impressive regional theater credentials. Directors Hollis and Robert Hall (responsible for tonight's Twelfth Night), too, have considerable seasoning, and both have directed Shakespeare many times.

Hollis' experience and his imagination showed 

The show's collaborators have added to that eeriness with the rough-hewn wood that has been applied to the festival's all-purpose set, with the unearthly cries and whistles that accompany the play's blackest deeds and with Hollis' use of a child to play the Third Witch - a suggestion of innocence gone corrupt. Yet those elements are only trappings to support generally fine ensemble acting, and it is the acting, from the youngest to the most seasoned performers, that illustrates the true horror of this tale.

Sybil Lines delivers a Lady Macbeth whose desires are frightening and her delirium extraordinary; Jeff Strohaver is a stalwart, vehement Macduff, a man whose strength and moral standing make him the title character's virtuous counterpart, whose mirror-image - Macbeth himself - goes tragically wrong. And Culliton, who also plays the laughingstock Malvolio in Twelfth Night, is an impressive Macbeth, a contemplative man whose ever-increasing fervor is vivid in his star-struck, haunted, glittering eyes.

Nothing is as it seems in Macbeth, a play in which the principled turn corrupt, in which crowns mean nothing and forests rise to meet the hills. Yet one thing is clear in this Orlando Shakespeare Festival production. The festival may still have plenty of fine-tuning ahead of it. But, like its Macbeth, it's on solid ground.