| We Can't Reach You, Hartford |
 An investigative history of the Hartford Circus Fire of July 6th, 1944. Nominated for a Fringe First at the 2006 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. |
| Daguerreotype |
| In the twilight of his life, famed photographer Matthew Brady must choose between the life he has built and the legacy he wants to leave behind. |
| Tone Clusters |
| Renowned prose author Joyce Carol Oates explores honesty, perspective, and denial through one couple's harrowing attempt to save the person they love |
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| Sunday, June 24, 2007 |
| Radio Macbeth |
 In my ongoing quest to blog about every play with the word “radio” somewhere in its title (is Talk Radio still playing? I need a trifecta here), I went up to New Haven this weekend to see SITI Company perform Radio Macbeth at Yale Rep.
The play begins with a group of actors rehearsing a radio production of Macbeth on a rather bare stage. Bereft of any traditional staging elements, the actors make do with what they have: tables, folding chairs, and of course, several strategically placed radio microphones. There’s a lot of things that someone more knowledgeable than myself could say about this play, comments about Anne Bogart’s (in)famous viewpointing, the various merits of its soundscape (Radio Macbeth was co-directed by SITI’s sound designer, Darron L. West), or the wisdom of staging a work of Shakespeare that is comprehensible only to those audience members who enter the theater already familiar with the play. But what struck me more than anything else was how this non-traditional staging seemed to open up a play I thought I knew rather well.
In my slow march through the academy, I have, by my count, studied Macbeth no less than 3 times (not to mention how many times my samurai-obsessed best friend made me watch Throne of Blood). I am, needless to say, familiar with Macbeth. And yet, before Friday night, I don’t think I had realized the multitudes this play contained. The fury and nihilism of Macbeth’s “Out, out brief candle!” The subtle menace of the witches. The stoic feminism of Lady Macduff. The haunting juxtaposition of the doctor and gentlewoman’s clinical prose and Lady Macbeth’s lyrical descent into madness. But above all, the righteous self-pity of Macduff when he learns of his family’s murder.
But I must also feel it as a man,
I cannot but remember such things were,
That were most precious to me. Did heaven look on,
And would not take their part? Sinful Macduff,
They were all struck for thee! naught that I am,
Not for their own demerits, but for mine,
Fell slaughter on their souls. Heaven rest them now!
Never before, not in all of my readings of the play, not in any of the times I had heard these words spoken aloud, or seen them on film, had I understood their power. But watching Macduff advance, his Birnam wood nothing but a few folding chairs, with the words stripped naked, nothing but echoes into a microphone, I finally understood.
And that, I suppose, is why Shakespeare is a genius. |
posted by stephen @ 1:19 AM  |
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