How many Shakespeare lovers out there—there must be many—have longed for the day when they can watch a girls-school drama society put on a production of Macbeth? At last, your wish has been granted.
Erica Schmidt has just pieced the Scottish play together as what looks like the abso-tively right presentation of something the clever students at Brearley or Miss Porter’s would present to cheering classmates and indulgent parents as their gung-ho go at the Bard’s classic. Schmidt has retitled her fun take Mac Beth–with that emphasis on the “Beth” part for extra giggles.
So much of the good-ol’-‘speare waltz is a hoot that it begs more space than is immediately available for listing favorites. But maybe some: One fave moment would have to be when Lady Macbeth (Ismenia Mendes) learns by missive from Macbeth (Isabelle Fuhrman) that King Duncan (a member of the mostly-doubling seven-person cast) will be hitting the castle and therefore on site for being knifed to death. She’s so excited in her unsex-me-now mood that she falls supine to the floor and joyfully kicks her legs in the air.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★★ review here.]
Other fab turns occur several times when something exciting happens while the kissy-facey Macbeths are plotting his way to the throne and, once he achieves it, realizing all the spilled blood won’t ever be washed away, literally or figuratively. At moments like these, all seven players jump up and down with all the vivacity of that school-spirit day when the field-hockey home team wins the league championship. O, the girlish elation!
Such wonderful Mac Beth hilarity from start to finish, as the participants cling tenaciously to the opportunity for reciting Shakespeare’s deathless poetry and prose with voices not yet trained for the challenge but eager to declaim all the same, no matter what flat, lusterless readings taint the air.
But wait a minute. Hold the phone—and make that a smart phone, because a selfie will eventually be snapped. The truth seems to be that Schmidt hasn’t meant this Mac Beth to be a Brearley-Miss Potter’s replica, after all. That has to explain why the audience, intuiting her actual intent, isn’t ceaselessly chuckling at the Bard-based silliness.
No, on Catherine Cornell’s set featuring an upturned couch and a small pool, the director is apparently parsing Shakespeare in the #MeToo age. She’s really after finding the gender queries arising in a play that, when first seen, was essayed by an all-male cast—the Elizabethan tradition unchanged until Charles II was restored as monarch.
It’s needless to say—isn’t it?—that probing of this sort has been carrying on for some time with non-traditional casting. Actresses have taken on Hamlet for many decades, and all-female Shakespeare casts are hardly fresh. The best have been Phyllida Lloyd’s versions (Julius Caesar, The Tempest, Henry IV Parts I and II), where the brilliant conceit is that women prisoners are playing Shakespeare. We’re not watching women pretending to be men but women explicitly taking on male roles. A significant difference.
Indeed, in many of these jump-on-the-gender-blind-performing bandwagons, light can be spread. (Jeff Croiter is the lighting designer here.) But no light is being shed here, no new insights into the text is startlingly revealed. This Mac Beth is simply a mistake, and the best thing to do about it is to wait for Schmidt to move on to her next project and for Red Bull Theater to move on to its next.
It also must be said that it’s likely every Chapin class boasts at least one young woman who not only wants to become an actor but has the talent(s) to follow through. Among these cast members, most with impressive credits, the stand-out is Mendes. As Lady Macbeth, she is, of course, playing a woman’s role and while doing it, is delivering a mad scene of power and pathos. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow for her.
Trivia: Mac Beth isn’t the first time a girls-school group has been shown grappling with great literature. There may be many, but the one certainly worthy of attention is Cameron Macintosh’s 1993 Moby Dick. In that one the girls of St. Godrick’s, in order to raise funds, put on the Herman Melville volume in the school swimming pool. When the musical(!) opened, London critics went at it with harpoons, but were they missing something? I saw the toothy tuner, admired it, and decided Macintosh had been mistaken to give it a full-scale West End outing. Done much more intimately, it could be the girls-school click that Mac Beth only hopes to become.
Mac Beth opened May 19, 2019, at the Lucille Lortel Theatre and runs through June 9. Information: redbulltheater.com
