Twenty-seven years ago, Alan Cumming made his professional theater debut, appearing as Malcolm in a Glaswegian Macbeth. This summer, he’ll return to the tragedy, reprising his turn as the disinherited Malcolm at the Lincoln Center Festival. In addition to Malcolm, Cumming will also play Malcolm’s brother Donalbain and his murdered father, Duncan. The usurping Macbeth? Cumming will play him, too—also his wife, messengers, doctors, attendants, porters, three witches, various lords, and Birnam Wood.

Beginning July 5, Lincoln Center will host the Scottish play—whose dramatis personae lists some three dozen roles—as performed by just one Scottish actor. Set in an insane asylum replete with CCTV, this Macbeth will also feature actors playing a nurse and an orderly. But Cumming, as a disturbed patient compelled to repeat Macbeth, will voice every role. “It’s a spooky old play,” says John Tiffany, associate director of the National Theatre of Scotland, which will co-produce the show.

Speaking by phone during a 36-hour visit to New York, Cumming says he has always wanted to return to the script and, in particular, the lead role. “I’m not obsessed,” he drawls in his winning Northern Scots accent, “but there are plays where I’ve thought at some point in my life, I’d like to do this part, do this character. I’ve always thought that about Macbeth in some form. Now I’m doing it in all forms.”

This production reunites Cumming and Tiffany, who last collaborated on a racy, sexy version of Euripides’ The Bacchae, which played the Lincoln Center Festival in 2008. Neither has been exactly lazy in the meantime. Tiffany directed the much-lauded docudrama Black Watch as well as the musical Once, which topped the Tony list with 11 nominations. Cumming earned two Emmy nominations for his work on The Good Wife, voiced a Smurf, hosted Masterpiece Mystery, and so on. Andrew Goldberg, head of New York’s Shakespeare Gym and a staff director on Black Watch, will co-direct.

For the full interview, click here.