Can I hook up Time Capsule directly to my Mac as an external hard drive?

I have a 1TB Time Capsule that works great, but it's only got about 51GB left on it. I need to hook up a second MBP so it can backup to the same Time Capsule, but to to do so, I need to free up at least 130GB of space. So I'm going in and deleting older backups using the command line:

ls /Volumes/Time\ Machine\ Backups/Backups.backupdb/California

sudo tmutil delete /Volumes/Time\ Machine\ Backups/Backups.backupdb/California/2015-03*

...to delete the two backups from March. I was then going to do -04* to delete all the April backups, and rinse and repeat down through June --- get rid of all the TM backups from early this year that I don't need. That should free up a solid 300GB or so.

However, after more than an hour, it's still deleting the first of the two backups in March! I know they're big folders to delete, but I figure it also has a lot to do with trying to do this via its Wi-Fi connection to the hard drive inside Time Capsule.

Is it possible to connect the hard drive inside the Time Capsule directly to my MBP, and treat it like any other external hard drive connected via USB, Thunderbolt, etc.? I thought if I could pull that off, it'd be a lot faster than this.

dt