“I’m not a fight choreographer, but I drew the pictures just like I would design a dance, and I used my sense of how to build something as you would build a number in a musical,” Mr. Ashford said. “It has to start with something, go to something else, go to something else. And then all of it has to go toward a final moment. You can’t keep the same pace the entire time or show 20 guys battling the entire time. You have to get everyone on board, and then show the specifics.”

In Manchester, the play was presented in a tiny space, a deconsecrated church seating just 200 people, 100 on either side of the stage. Here, in the Armory’s great drill hall, the space is many times bigger, but the action takes place in a manageably small stage set up at one end, with 500 audience members on each side, said Christopher Oram, the set and costume designer. (The rest of the hall is being made up into a heath that the audience, divided at the door into various “clans” affiliated with the rivalries onstage, will have to trudge through to get to the seats). As in Manchester, they will be seated in deliberately uncozy wooden bleachers that force them to remain alert, almost as participants in the action.

“The idea is of using the mud and rain to get the pagan and earthy quality,” Mr. Oram said. “You get the sounds and the smell and the immediate experience of a play drenched in blood and mud.”

At first, he said, he was nervous that audience members seated in the “blood and water zone,” as he called it, would resent being splattered by battlefield byproducts. “It’s not like a theme park, where we’re going to hand out plastic ponchos,” he said. “But then we realized that everybody was kind of into it, like it was a badge of honor.” Some audience members even returned for a second bout, wearing their dirtied clothes from the time before.

The big-action opening means that the first time we hear Macbeth speak, he is out of breath and full of testosterone, having just “unseamed” — that is, disemboweled — someone right in front of us.