Shakespeare in Griffith Park

Macbeth. My first Shakespeare in the Park. Three man dance troupe (to the crooning of Tom Waits) as the opening act. Then the descent into madness. A magical and inspiring evening...

Notes from the Director -- David Melville

Generally, I love Shakespeare because a great humanism is woven into nearly all his work. Empathy is valued. Hypocrisy and arrogance are skewered. Humanity's capacity for self-sacrifice, for finding a higher purpose than self-interest, is vaunted. There is also a gentle acceptance of our foibles and deeper flaws. Shakespeare sees us in toto, yet still manages to paint us as worthy, to say our lives and our actions matter.

Macbeth is not a play which follows this pattern. It's certainly the bleakest of Shakespeare's plays. For though it has characters which embody great virtue, Macbeth himself is no such man. What's more, his eventual fate lacks a sense of moral satisfaction.

As we rehearsed, one question we returned to was, "What makes this play frightening?" It certainly reads like a ghost story or fireside tale. King James, the monarch at the time the play was written, was a known expert on the occult, and Shakespeare served up a tale full of witchcraft and augury. The presence of witches and the casting of spells would have frightened many members of a Renaissance audience. We spent quite a bit of time thinking how best to create a sense of witchcraft in a modern telling of Macbeth, without resorting to comic book characters or cliche. What we focused on was defining the witches' power, while also not resisting the possibility of humor. The witches are threaded throughout the play in a way we hope conveys a ubiquitous malevolence, one that is always  observable if you are looking for it. They are also an expression of the lack of human control central to the play.

Working on Macbeth has been always been an ambivalent thing for me. The language, the first pace, the unrelenting action: all these are deeply attractive to me, as is the complex and oddly loving relationship between Macbeth and his wife. But there comes a point when I feel...depleted. I argue with my wife more. It's a dark story with which to associate.

The feeling is a direct reaction to what I find so frightening about the play. Shakespeare, the great humanist, created a different sort of world in Macbeth. In it, he posits a world in which there is no control. That isn't so odd - nearly all the comedies have one lover or another declaring, "Fate! Show thy force!" What is much worse is that in Macbeth, Shakespeare posits a world where our lives have no meaning, where the sum or our existence is a 'tale told by an idiot.' I shouldn't be surprised that Shakespeare could imagine such a world. What does surprise me is the weight with which he makes that argument. In the play, he offers little in the way of antidote, and I'm disturbed that I don't know why. Is it a warning? A product of a long and sad night? Ultimately, the play requires me to contemplate that my life may not have meaning. And that is what frightens me.

But perhaps Shakespeare, the great humanist, has not abandoned me. Because when I rouse myself from this state of existential torpor, what I am left with is a sense of defiance. Life only signifies nothing if I allow it to, one of Shakespeare's greatest plays notwithstanding! Sometimes we must face our worst fears to see what we believe in, and perhaps that is why Shakespeare wrote the play, and why we must perform it.