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Drama Division Lifts the Curse From Shakespeare's (Shhh …) Macbeth By TOMMY SMITH
Please. Don't say the real title of this play in any theater. Especially when viewing the upcoming production by the Drama Division's fourth-year actors. Their lives depend on it.
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| A costume sketch by Christianne Meyers for the title role in Shakespeare's Macbeth. |
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One of the most popular (and infamous) of Shakespeare's tragedies, the Scottish play is notorious in theatrical circles for being beset by horrible misfortune. The play—a lean and mean rumination on the consequences of egregious ambition—includes some of the Bard's grittiest and bloodiest stage action, with enough deceit and witchcraft and murder to fill two Two Gentleman of Veronas. Lore has it that Will cribbed some lines from actual black-magic incantations that, when spoken aloud, cursed the play with their wicked devilry.History seems to agree with this superstition. At its premiere in 1606, the actor playing the eponymous character's wife fell ill and died. (Shakespeare himself subsequently stepped in to play the role.) Theatrical great Lilian Baylis was to play the same role in the early '30s, but died on the day of the final dress rehearsal; when the theater later remounted the play, her portrait fell from the wall on opening night. In a production in the late 1990s, Alec Baldwin stabbed a fellow actor (who survived). While crossing the Potomac River one April afternoon in 1865, Abraham Lincoln read some murderous lines from the play to fellow passengers; a week later he was assassinated.To this day, actors and directors still fear the "bad juju" surrounding the play. Uttering the title in a theater is strictly forbidden. But don't worry; there is recourse if you happen to slip. While there are variations on the method, the basic curse-breaking dictates that the offender leave the room, spin three times, spit over each shoulder, then knock on the door, and ask for permission to re-enter.Hopefully, there won't be much of this bizarre activity going on outside the Drama Theater when the Scottish play premieres this month. Thankfully, as of this writing, the cast reports that the rehearsal environment has remained curse-free. "Nothing yet has happened in our production. Maybe it will, and then I can believe, but right now I think it is more comical than serious," actor Serena Reeder said. "It is a scary world, but not cursed.""I say [the Scottish play] as much as possible," actor Mauricio Salgado said. "There is a little part of me that wants to challenge it, yell in the demons' faces, tell them to bring it on.""Perhaps the fact that most of the scenes take place in the dark also makes the play more accident-prone," suggested Oscar Isaac, who plays the title character.Rebecca Guy, the production's director and resident acting instructor at Juilliard, echoes that idea: "I'm not superstitious in that way. Any play that has been done this much in the last 400 years is bound to experience a few broken legs." She pauses, looking over her shoulder. "Maybe I shouldn't say that out loud."
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| Costume sketch of Lady Macbeth by Christianne Meyers. |
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The Scottish play follows the rise and hard fall of the title character who (at the urging of a trio of ghastly witches and his equally treacherous wife) murders his way to the top of Scottish royalty, only to be undone by the very virtues that enabled his ascension. Guy, who has done this play twice before as both actor and director, tackles the staging and concept of this production in a manner different from previous versions. "My background is as an actor. I'm very physical and experiential in my own exploration," Guy explained. "I'm essentially directing the play from that perspective."This is apparent from Guy's rehearsal process. While staging the opening scene (which involves the aforementioned incantations), Guy is constantly up on her feet with the actors, demonstrating movements and working with them to find a physical life to match Shakespeare's language."Becky works quite fast and that's exciting because it forces you to rise to the challenge and not to over-think or plan out too much," Isaac said. "You just have to go for it and see what happens.""I feel liberated by her process," said Reeder, who plays one of the witches. "Becky is very keen and knows what she wants, but allows you to create your own world, within the world that she has created—sets, costumes, vision."Guy hopes to strip down the stage action to its bare essentials so that the audience and performers can focus on the actual story, not an "interpretation" of the text."Any time I went to a specific time or place, it distanced me from the story," Guy said. "What we didn't do is say, 'This is Hungary 1932' or 'This is post-War London.'" The set—a forest of off-white marble columns bisected by a perforated metallic walkway terminating in a steel staircase—reinforces the anonymity of setting of which Guy speaks. "Twenty years ago, the production I worked on had been all natural: steam, bubbles, moss, etc.," Guy said. "For this one, I started to shift my thinking to a more psychological or personal approach."To bring this Elizabethan story into today's world, she will infuse a decidedly contemporary vision of an everyman's downfall. "It's Gandhi, I think, who talks about the line between good and evil running through the heart of every man. When the play is working, we understand that—fear that line, fear what happens when we cross it on an imaginative, psychological, and spiritual level.""A study of the poisoning of a great mind is something that is very compelling to watch and hear," Isaac said. "Imagine a Colin Powell or a Muhammad Ali falling into the depths of depravity and despair, into evil. What's great about the play is that a man onstage becomes the vessel for an audience to travel to the darkest recesses of the human imagination. They choose to hear the witches, to let the ambition grow inside of themselves, to acquiesce to their wife, to murder their father figure, their brother, to destroy society, to disease their own minds and die fighting as they descend to hell … and then go home and watch Will and Grace."Tommy Smith is an artist diploma candidate in playwriting.
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