LAKEVIEW — Fair is foul and foul is fair when all the characters from Da Bard’s so-called “Scottish Play” become members of the local police force.

That’s the attention-grabbing premise behind The Conspirators’ “Chicago Cop Macbeth,” which opened Friday. The show stirs its cauldron full of betrayal, murder and Bridgeport accents through June 8 at Otherworld Theatre, 3914 N. Clark St.

It began as something of a happy accident during a theatrical exercise before the pandemic, explained Wm. Bullion, executive artistic director of The Conspirators, an experimental performance collective formed in 2016.

It felt like it really clicked, Bullion recalled. Afterward, he was chatting with his friend and fellow Conspirator, Sid Feldman, who pondered, “You know, we could do the whole play like that.”

The idea percolated for a while. “On a lark, I just kind of started adapting the script to align with the fictitious structure of Chicago cops,” Bullion continued. “I changed the nomenclature: from king to superintendent, from thane to commander, etc. And we cut the script down — we don’t like doing stuff more than a couple hours long.

“We did a reading of it during the pandemic, and we were alternately laughing and going, ‘Ooh, this hits.’”

All shows produced by The Conspirators are performed in a mode they call The Style , which blends the Italian tradition of commedia dell’arte with some German expressionism, then adds a touch of Looney Tunes. The actors wear whiteface makeup, which intensifies the look and the vibes.

“It’s highly emotional, and therefore, high stakes,” said Bullion, a California native who grew up in Evanston and currently lives in North Park.

While The Style amps up the laughs in a comedy, the approach doesn’t belie any drama — and of course, there’s plenty of the latter in “Macbeth.” Feeding into Bullion’s creative process as he adapted Shakespeare was a real-life Chicago tragedy: when a police officer killed 13-year-old Adam Toledo in 2021.

“Everything The Conspirators do is political,” he said. “For me, another one of the cementing ideas came when Adam Toledo — a kid standing there with his hands up, doing what he was told — was shot by the police. And I was like: This is [like] the murder of MacDuff’s family! So that’s a dramatic anchor to the piece.”

While “Chicago Cop Macbeth” is trimmed down from the original version of the play, Bullion generally didn’t alter the language, other than transposing titles of authority into police hierarchy and making any location names local. So the witches don’t deliver a prophecy involving Birnam Wood to Macbeth — instead, it’s Daniel Burnham Woods.

“We make all sorts of local references,” he said. “At the beginning, they’re coming back from a war against the Evanston cops, so Macbeth becomes thane of Rogers Park district. The witches say, ‘Where shall we three meet again?’ Not on the heath — they meet Macbeth in the parking lot of Soldier Field.”

Those Chicago-centric alterations will likely please local audience members, which is fine by Bullion. He anticipates some dissonance between the show’s extreme modes: “We’re going in with a comedic sensibility, but really, ‘Macbeth’ is a tragedy.”

“Chicago Cop Macbeth” runs for four weeks, playing at 8 p.m. Thursdays through Sundays through June 8 at Otherworld Theatre, 3914 N. Clark St. Tickets are $30, and some shows have already sold out. More information is available on the Otherworld website .