The “Scottish play” as superstitious actors prefer to call “Macbeth”, soon to open at A Noise Within, seems the Shakespearean work best suited to modern tastes. Consider: it’s very violent, frankly goofy in that it’s rife with witches, ghosts and hallucinations, and, best of all for reluctant theatergoers, it’s mercifully short.
In fact, reading “Macbeth” today is reminiscent of current reality television offerings like “Very Scary People.” There’s a happily married power couple on the way up who get the big eye, and they’re willing to kill as part of their power-grab. The gold-digging wife urges on the troubled husband. A further pop-psych reading of the backstory also flags possible signals of pre-murther trauma and mental dysfunction, what Elizabethans would have called “hysteria” in the original sense, stemming from Lady MacB’s apparent loss of a child, possibly even postpartum depression according to some Shakespeare scholars.
This interpretation is intriguing since the play is indeed peppered with text-references to maternity and female embodiment, as in blood and breastfeeding. The witches even toss a baby’s finger into their double-bubble cauldron, leading some radical students of the Bard to wonder if the sacrificed infant was Macbeth’s own, as part of Hecate’s bargain.
Although originally set in the wispy, witchy moors of medieval Scotland, this play gets around. In 1936, a 20-year-old Orson Welles produced an iconoclastic stage version set in 19th century Haiti, with an all-Black cast, now commonly called the “Voodoo Macbeth.” In 1957, Akira Kurosawa released his classic adaptation, “Throne of Blood” / “Spider Web Castle,” which transposes the plot to feudal Japan, using stylistic elements from Noh drama. This almost wacky mileage is proof of the work’s universal capacity to thrill audiences.
And theater multi-hyphenate (director, writer, actor, filmmaker, educator), Harlem-born Andi Chapman, who directs the upcoming production, has even more gris-gris black cat bones, keep-away and come-to-me powders in the proverbial red flannel trick-bag. Yes, now the Thane of Cawdor is about to land in the Big Easy during the period between 1870 and 1920, what Chapman calls “that pocket of time I call the Reconstruction bubble.”
Chapman has trod the boards before at A Noise Within, notably helming the company’s stunning 2023 production of “The Bluest Eye.” Chapman is an alumna of the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University and is the Associate Artistic Director of the Ebony Repertory Theatre.
Although key roles in the production are played by actors of color, Chapman says “We’re not making any political or social statement about race even as subtext. What we have is a company of highly capable actors who happen to be ethnically diverse.”
The freshest twist in Chapman’s vision of the play is her view of Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth, who she says “…are not monsters. They are human, just a married couple who made a mistake. They desperately cling to a prophecy, driven by the grief of losing their child.”
Conventional productions typically focus on maniacal ambition, but Chapman says there’s more. “The underlying loss defines Macbeth’s motivation. I want to shine a light on what human beings sometimes do to replace their grief.”
An even weirder possibility occurs to us now, which is the notion that perhaps the Macbeths, like the noisily infertile Martha and George (ICYMI modeled after the Presidential Washingtons) in Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, may have dreamed up an imaginary child as part of their twisted marital currency. This sort of delusional construct, referring back to “Very Scary People,” is common in criminal ideation. Fantasy often provides justification for bad behavior of all kinds.
Chapman’s humanistic lens on the story is daring as it closes the gap between the story and the audience. By not making Macbeth and Lady Macbeth into comfortably distanced Others, we are forced to consider that we, too, might make mistakes that qualify as evil. Encountering the blood-stained royal pair as just regular, normal, heartbroken folks who tragically run off the rails is far more morally troubling than denying, externalizing, projecting, deflecting, transferring the badness, the Shadow-self we desperately wish to disown.
Still don’t believe it? Try a little network slumming with host Keith Morrison on Dateline NBC, the longest-running primetime show in NBC history. Week after week, Morrison introduces us to ordinary people who not only kill but also torture and dismember their victims. The crimes generally have to do with money, or jealousy, or both. The subjects are often suburban, Midwestern, and young. Many of the perps say that they picked up murder-101 DIY tips by watching TV, which gives us pause every time see someone on line at The Home Depot purchasing X-Large Hefty bags, duct tape, plastic sheeting, nylon cord, twist-ties, and multiple gallons of bleach. And a hand-saw.
Hmmm…
Chapman’s interpretation refuses to allow us to maintain the smug, self-righteous illusion that we ourselves could never, ever go so far wrong.
By contrast, Shakespeare’s groundlings most certainly received “Macbeth” as a morality play, a warning about the threat of sin, unleashed by the machinations of the three weird sisters. Given the superstitious Christian fervor of the playwright’s time, it’s reasonable to conclude that the theatergoers at The Old Globe felt genuinely vulnerable to evil as an external force to be actively resisted, and may have understood “Macbeth” as a cautionary tale.
Far more compelling: Chapman’s direction reveals that the enemy is not “out there,” but within us.
Gore always draws a crowd, especially when the experience is free of risk and guilt, as the glut of contemporary entertainment devoted to serial killers and nihilistic crime sprees confirms. Chapman is playing with creative fire by suggesting that perhaps we all possess the potential capacity to do great harm, by the pricking of my thumbs.
DEETS
- “Macbeth”
- Previews February 9 at 2:00 PM, February 12, 13, 14, 7:30 PM
- Opening night February 15, 7:30 PM, followed by free post-show cast party. Performances run through March 9.
- Directed by Andi Chapman
- Cast includes Kamal Bolden, Julanne Chidi Hill, Alex Morris, Ben Cain, Michael Boatman, Mildred Marie Langford, Roshni Shukla, Joy DeMichelle
- Tickets here
- A Noise Within, 3352 East Foothill Boulevard, Pasadena 91107
- 626-356-3100
- www.anoisewithin.org
