Macbeth by the Actors’ Shakespeare Project
Date: November 3, 2007
Time: 2 p.m.
Location: Boston University
An adventurous group of local Mawrters (Clare Nunes ’56, Carla Lynton ’55, Louise Ambler ’56, Roo Dane ’61, Beebe Nelson ’61, Barbara Powell ’62, Dorianne Low ’66, Linda Holiner ’75, Linda Holiner ’75) and 3 guests attended a first rate production of Macbeth, staged by the Actors’ Shakespeare Project. The cast was all women, a nice turn on the all-male casting of Shakespeare’s day. I’ve seen—and directed and acted in—all-female Shakespeare scenes and productions before. They make you hear things that, when said by men, you just accept.
Seeing the all-female Macbeth brought me back to the May Day plays we staged in the Cloisters, and in particular to the wonderful production of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Knight of the Burning Pestle which I co-directed with Kate Evans ’61. All the pairs of characters were short and tall – that was our directorial trope. The allusion of the title was so completely lost on me – on all of us – that it wasn’t till I began to write this paragraph (nearly 50 years later) that I realized what it was. In case you’re not sure either, here’s the unexpurgated definition from Wiki:
A mortar and pestle is a tool used to crush, grind, and mix substances. The pestle is a heavy stick whose end is used for pounding and grinding, and the mortar is a bowl. The substance is ground between the pestle and the mortar.
Makes me wonder if Professor Arthur Colby Sprague, who was our faculty advisor, missed the allusion too.
In Macbeth, there’s a lot of talk about what men do and what women do, and there’s Macbeth’s famous “bear men only”, addressed to Lady M when she is being particularly horrid. But the challenges to one’s assumptions also come in more subtle ways in this production.
I found Marya Lowry’s Macbeth superb. Her every word was intelligible (as, in fact, were almost all the other words in the play). She had gravitas and grace and beauty, and oh my it’s a horrid tale. I have never been so aware as in this production of the idiocy of Macbeth’s turn-around. S/he comes on stage and delivers what amounts to about 10 or 20 lines about how stupid it would be to kill Duncan, how things are just going really well now, how when you do stuff like that it’s really hard, as s/he says later, to “trammel up the consequences.” It takes Lady M about 30 lines to convince him otherwise, and somehow it’s even harder to take, even stupider and more unbelievable, when the actors are female.
Paula Plum as Lady M was also superb. The most bewitching moment in her performance for me was her hand-washing scene. How could anyone do that in a way that is new and fresh and horrifying? She did, licking at her hands, scrubbing them with short desperate strokes.
MacDuff and Lady MacDuff were played by the same actor, Sarah Newhouse. She was wonderful as Lady MacDuff, perhaps not quite so on as MacDuff – but that scene when he learns of her death – “all my pretty chicks at one fell swoop?” – had me in tears. I think the grip, for me, was “my country” – the scene made me reflect on my country. I’ve been imagining George W. Bush playing Lady Macbeth and trying, madly, to wash his hands – it somehow seems the only fitting ending for our horrible 8 years.
In our sophomore year Kate directed me in Katherine and Petruccio, a one act cobbled from the Taming of the Shrew. I played Petruccio, and my Katherine was a senior who was headed for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. She chased me around the stage until Kate finally kept me late after a rehearsal and gave me reason to be more afraid of her Kate than my on-stage version, and I was finally able to stand my ground. I felt a huge relief when I literally kicked Petruccio’s “groom” across the Cloisters as s/he was trying to pull off my boot.
I’ve often wondered what playing with gender does in one’s growing up. I think it gave me more confidence in myself, and perhaps an added sense that most of who I think I am is pretty much pure chance – male/female, smart/dumb, rich/poor. To act in a play, or to direct one, is to take on personas that might be very far removed from one’s “normal” experience. I loved being flat-chested and deep voiced enough to play men – the rest of the time those assets seemed like huge liabilities. In fact, playing men seemed in some ways more normal to me than trying to take on the “girl part” that my mother had scripted for me. What I know for sure is that, acting or directing or being in the audience, cross-gender casting gives my settled ways of thinking a good shaking up.
November 03 2007 01:11 pm | Outings
