A Reflection: The (mis)fortunes of Lady Macbeth

Backstage one more time, hovering in my special scorpions bedchamber, in my black gown sitting on the edge of the bed listening to the waves crash and the musical pre-show banter and soon the conch will blow and we’ll be in it one more time…

goodnight lady macbeth
enjoy the ride
this time you really get to die, not to be reborn to do it again tomorrow
tonight you go to bed
get some sleepe.

Every show leaves it’s own particular imprint on psyche and soul. With a role like Lady Macbeth, it’s imperative for me to establish a ritual, or protocol, for getting in and out of that emotional and psychological territory. Taking care to leave her at the Fort, and not to take her home with me.

The opportunity to revisit this role, particularly in such short order and alongside my closest artistic collaborator, allowed me to access a much deeper, more nuanced and specific expression in our 2014 production. The aftermath of cleansing my body of her presence is both immediate and slow. Initially, the surge of catching up with everything that’s been languishing on the back burner distracts. But there are the more subtle layers to deal with. I crave fat for weeks. Milk, cream, butter, oil – bring it! I want coconut and olive oil everywhere, on everything – on my skin, in my hair and lots in my food. Replenishing. I eat like a lumberjack for a few days.

There is an extreme physical toll in working in an environment as exposing and raw as Fort Point – with severe winds, piercing cold and penetrating dampness. And there was the series of small accidents… The shocking impact of a dagger hilt to the cheekbone mid tech rehearsal. Keep on working, now with an ice pack strapped to my face. My comrades offer their blood and flesh and bone to the work as well. Carmen, one of the nefarious murderers, gave herself a deep bruise literally the size of her hand…from smashing the baby’s head too damn hard in the Macduff family scene one night.

(By the way, the baby’s head was a rutabaga. We have experimented with a variety of vegetables seeking the optimal head cracking sound. Onions have a nice thud and squish, but they stink like…well onions. Undeniably and unavoidably so. Acorn squash and butternut squash are nice, but none of the squash family come close to the horrible satisfaction of the rutabaga. Rutabaga, I don’t know who eats you. But you are a wonderful prop for stage violence.)

Then of course, the adventure of John, our Macbeth, losing his front tooth, mid-performance. This not only required his commitment to staying totally in the flow, despite the obvious shock and dismay, but in addition, a more refined attention to pronunciation – for obvious reasons. On the – ahem – second episode of flying teeth, the piercing gaze of our Maria, the attentive little witch that she is, tracked the flight of Macbeth’s tooth from her perch in the window above, scurried down into the audience, and found it.

These misfortunes seem to pile up into a great mountain when I begin enumerating…
But they can’t touch the quiet joys of moments alone in the fortress, under the full moon, or under the sunset soaked sky. The precious moments when a perfect shaft of light streams in through a thin window in a casemate otherwise submerged in perpetual darkness. The glory of private views onto the slice of solitary beach just below the fort to the west, a strip of sand untouched by human footprints. The practical and pleasurable act of steadying myself as Lady Macbeth after the torment that is the banquet scene, with a few moments in the thick shadows of a tucked away arch that is covered in sand for some reason (did it blow in through the window? why is it here on the third floor?). I press my hands into the sand canvas and remind myself I have a body.

Lady Macbeth is unraveling from the beginning, the madness doesn’t come suddenly, it’s there all along. Like a hard boiled egg that’s been cracked, but not yet peeled. The shell just holding together, despite it’s apparent wholeness. The confining leather corset and tight waisted skirts, the making of her face, the need for some physical contact with the fort walls at all times…all efforts to keep. it. together. A sense of vertigo rushes in when Lady Macbeth loses contact with the brick and veers into open space. From there she tumbles headlong into the “out damn spot” sequence. A fragile object hurtling through space, fatal impact inevitable…

After one performance, I asked a friend her impressions of the egg drop at the onset of the play. This particular audience member does not identify as a theatregoer or even as much of an art enthusiast (and is certainly not an active Shakespeare fan). I find her responses entirely authentic, not glossed with a desire to please. Among other pleasing things she describes about that cold windy night at the Fort with We Players…
“The egg drop? Oh, I don’t know what it was supposed to mean. But I guess it seemed like…”
a pause
“…an exclamation point and a question mark.”

I’d like all beginnings and endings to come close to this…

!

?

–Ava Roy
Founding Artistic Director, We Players

Macbeth Plot Summary

Excited to see Macbeth at Fort Point, but want to brush up on the story before you see it? Look no further!
Read on for a plot summary of Shakespeare’s tragedy brought to you by our co-directors, Ava and John.

Ancient Scotland: Macbeth, a small-time thane (chieftain), is instrumental in defeating a very powerful rebellion against the aging King Duncan. On the trek home from battle with his comrade-in-arms Banquo, three “Weird Sisters” appear and prophecy that Macbeth will be king and that Banquo will father a long line of kings. Next, Duncan promotes Macbeth for his part in the war and names his son Malcome heir to the throne. The king and his retinue will stay with the Macbeths that night on their way home from the front.

Macbeth returns to his castle ahead of the others and confides in his wife, who persuades him to kill the king. Lady Macbeth hosts a party, drugging all the guests, thus laying the groundwork for the murder. Macbeth, weary still from battle and rattled by inner turmoil, does the deed. Macduff, a powerful thane who has not spent the night, arrives in the morning to find the king dead. Macbeth, pretending vengeance, kills the king’s two bodyguards, and Malcome flees to England.

Macbeth is crowned King, but, still unable to sleep and afraid of the sisters’ prophecy, he hires two servants to kill his friend Banquo and Banquo’s son Fleance. During the muddled assassination, Fleance escapes. At another banquet, Macbeth confronts Banquo’s bloody ghost, much to the confusion of the thanes loyal to Macbeth, whose numbers are beginning to dwindle. By now, Lady Macbeth is losing her grip on sanity.

Macbeth returns to the Weird Sisters who present him with two consoling riddles: His power is safe until the forest approaches his castle and no man “born of woman” will ever threaten his life. However, Banquo’s line of kings will “stretch out to the crack of doom.” The Thane of Ross appears on the empty heath with news that Macduff has fled to England to join forces with Malcome. Macbeth, “stepped in blood so far,” orders the utter destruction of Macduff’s entire clan.

In England, Macduff pledges his support to Malcome and learns from Ross that his wife and children have been slaughtered. Aligned against the tyrant and with the support of the English forces, Macduff and Malcome lead the charge towards Dunsinane.

As overwhelming forces approach Macbeth’s castle, the crazed Lady Macbeth dies. The attacking soldiers disguise their numbers by carrying branches hacked from the forest, breach the walls and fight Macbeth’s remaining soldiers. Macduff meets Macbeth who prevails in the ensuing duel until he learns that his adversary was not “born of woman” but was “from his mother’s womb untimely ripp’d!” Macbeth loses his head and young Malcome is crowned the new King of Scotland.

— Ava Roy & John Hadden, Co-Directors of Macbeth at Fort Point 2014

Ava Roy as Lady Macbeth

John Hadden as Macbeth - Member, Actors Equity Association

Kevin Singer as Malcome

Nathaniel Justiniano as Ross

Dixon Phillips as Macduff

Steve Boss as Duncan

(L to R): Julie Douglas, Caroline Parsons, and Maria Leigh as the Weyard Sisters

More Than Blood & Gore

Working the final showdown between Macbeth and Macduff last night at the Popell's, my wonderful hosts (and We Players supporters–Andy is Board President): Their son Isaac meets us with his own nerf swords and shows us a thing or two in an impromptu hackfest. It’s a good thing our thanes don’t have Isaac to contend with! As we go to work in the evening light, Isaac sets himself up with popcorn and blankets and a big comfy chair behind a plate glass window to watch us work outside in the courtyard.

We begin with swords made of pvc and foam pipe insulation, light and relatively harmless, going through each move, each impulse, very slowly, stopping to fix anything that feels uncertain or unmotivated, and speed it up by degrees, eventually switching over to the broadswords made of steel.

My father loved the phrase “Lay on, Macduff!” It was one of a small collection of phrases (Life’s Like That; Goddamn Bastards; That’ll Tighten His Sphincter; Bongo, Bongo, Bongo and so on) that could serve almost any occasion. My son Reilly, who did Shakespeare with Ava Roy when they were teenagers, was a member of a Very Young Company (they ranged in age from 4-7 when it began) that played every year to hundreds of amazed adults after the mainstage show, outdoors at the Mount, the home of the young Shakespeare & Co–and the only scene they never missed was the beheading of Macbeth.

“Turn, Hellhound, Turn!”

Violence is great for getting audiences. Every action film producer knows this, as did the King’s Players in 1600. But Shakespeare always wants to know what’s under the surface. What led to this? How can we find out more about a character from the way he or she dies? Shakespeare knows that when the audience is at their most focused it is a good time to throw some curve balls about the riddle of the human psyche–and the moment of death is one last chance to find out after all what is going on here!

In Shakespeare, death and violence are marked and felt. Ava is really good at underscoring this in her work with the Weyard Sisters, for instance, who are always super aware of each death and always mark it in some ritualized way.

Our colleague, Jamie Lyons, was watching us work on the scene in which, to convince her husband against his will to kill the King, for whom she seems to feel some terrible ancient hatred, Lady Macbeth enacts the killing of her own innocent baby. She is very specific in these few lines:

“I have given suck and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me-
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums
And dash’d the brains out had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.”

She knows what she is talking about; she’s nursed a male baby. Her own, presumably. It’s one of the mysteries of the play. In our version, she enacts the sequence physically, giving suck, plucking him away from her breast and smashing his invisible head against the stone courtyard floor. She hits a nerve; the next thing we know, Macbeth is “settled” to do the terrible deed.

When the murderers kill Lady Macduff and her fine, intelligent child, we have them also smashing her baby in the same way that we have seen Lady Macbeth mime the act in the earlier scene.

Jamie suggested that one of the Weyard Sisters could come and somehow sanctify the spot on the ground where the invisible baby is killed, after the scene’s end. And so it goes, bit by bit, we all participate in stringing these moments, images, experiences into a fabric that, if we’re diligent and lucky, hang together and give us more than blood and gore.

— John Hadden
Associate Artist and Co-director of Macbeth at Fort Point, 2014