Pat Rick on Mac Beth

Pat Rick on Mac Beth
In which I interview myself about recent local developments in Shakespeare

Pat: So you saw Mac Beth at Seattle Rep recently, what did you think?

Rick: Shakespeare had a habit of putting a play-within-the-play. Macbeth is not one of those. So it’s intriguing to me that the creative team at the Rep decided to use that device. In this production, the entire play – well, there are a lot of cuts – that you and I know as Macbeth is performed within Mac Beth. The idea is that seven private school girls in the present day have decided for some reason to perform the play for themselves and by themselves after school in a dreary vacant lot nearby.

Pat: And how do you think that worked?

Rick: It’s genius. It allows you to experience the play “updated for modern times” but also as-is, as written.

Pat: What do you mean?

Rick: It’s as if you were to watch Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet and a straight, full-on Elizabethan version of the play at the same time. You experience Macbeth and you also get to see the impact of the play on the girls simultaneously and sort of re-experience it in “real time” through their eyes.

Pat: You said “girls.” So the cast is all women?

Rick: Yes, and that was a good move, too. There was a talk-back after the show and two of the actors took questions. They said that having the cast (and all but one of the crew) be women allowed for so much extra freedom in the rehearsal room to just be and to just create. And that showed up on stage.

Pat: There are a lot of male-female dynamics between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. She attacks and challenges him to be a man; she laments, in a way not being a man; who is dominant in the relationship shifts back and forth. How does that work when both are played by women?

Rick: Terrific. And it seemed natural and right. With that freedom that I talked about, it seemed the actors were able to play and create in ways that might not otherwise be possible. And the husband-wife relationship became a human relationship. The humanity – or inhumanity came to the surface with nothing in the way.

Pat: Interesting.

Rick: Yes, I have been thinking about this since last year when I saw Rebel Kat’s Coriolanus. It also had an all-female cast. I had never seen the play performed – apparently, it is rarely done – and I had a lot of thoughts about how the relationship between Coriolanus and Aufidius might normally be portrayed and how it might come across. Coriolanus and Aufidius start out as enemies. By the end, they have joined forces against Rome. Why do they do that? Is it that they respect each other as soldiers? Is it sexual? At certain points in the play I saw, there was a palpable physical attraction.

Pat: Where did that take things?

Rick: Like in Mac Beth the actors seemed to have more freedom to play it as they wanted. The show really crackled. One thing I am sure of, I don’t think you lose anything when the cast is all women, or female-identified.

Pat: It seems like there has been a lot of Shakespeare recently in Seattle where the cast has been billed as all women.

Rick: I have noticed that. Personally, I have seen Mac Beth, and Coriolanus, as I mentioned. I also saw a version of King Lear with an all-female cast -- and three Lears! Besides that, gender-neutral casting in Shakespeare seems to be the norm -- around here at least.

Pat: Yes, just this past year, I saw The Horse in Motion’s Hamlet with two actors playing the part, one male, one female. Dacha Theatre did Shakespeare Dice: Hamlet, in which Hamlet was played by a different randomly selected member of the cast every night. Ghost Light did Twelfth Night with all sorts of gender-bending on top of what is already in the text. I personally was in Dacha’s Quick Bright Things, a version of Midsummer, in which both Titania and Oberon were played by women. And in 2016, I played Juliet’s Nurse in Dacha’s Dream Things True, a take on Romeo and Juliet.

Rick: Was that you in those shows? I remember it being me.

Pat: No, I’m pretty sure it was me.

Rick:

Well, we’ll leave that argument for another time.

Originally posted on my Facebook on June 3, 2018.