Macputz

Shit, I gotta get back to blogging regularly. This "month between posts" stuff is for the birds. As if anyone still follows this blog.

I'm on Thanksgiving Break now, which is wonderful. It's like a return to summer. I don't have a show on so my time's my own ... working on the next show.

I'm slugging through the script to Macbeth, seeing if I can adapt it to what it needs to be. You see, here's the thing ...

It's always best to do a show that the students want to do, you know? If they're excited about it, it's just more fun. Problem is I haven't been able to find a script that meets my college criteria (all women, significant roles specifically written for non-whites) that is as good as The Vic was. Man, that was a helluva piece.

So last year I was sitting in my office, trying to think of shows, and I was listening to students talk about how much they liked Macbeth. Now, now is the wrong time to do Macbeth. It was hot during the W. Bush administration because, at its heart, the show is about an ambitious man who steals power and must be brought down. Bingo! Part truth, part wishful thinking therapy. But, my boss always makes the Acting II students study Lady Macbeth's monologue, and they like it, and they were talking about it, and I thought ... "Hm, no roles written for non-white actors, but maybe I can get away with that because it's Shakespeare. What about an all-female version of Macbeth?"

So I went online and looked it up. There have been all-female versions but none, that I could find, where all the characters were female. And the strangest thing, I kept running into these critics or arts reporters or whoever the hell was writing this crap asking, "Do we really believe that women can be that ambitious?" No joke.

Now, I thought this was one of the dumbest questions I'd heard, but I checked with some of my students, just to be sure, and they were like, "Uh ... duh! Of course women can be ambitious! Don't be ridiculous."

Also at the time, I'd just seen this BBC project where they'd taken four Shakespeare plays and wildly adapted them, modern language and all, to see if the core stories still worked. I was dubious since so much of what's fun about Shakespeare is the language, but they were really cool. I watched their adaptations for both Much Ado About Nothing and Macbeth, and they were both dead on. They really hit the core stories and characters even though they set them in wild settings. Macbeth took place in a four star restaurant in Scotland where Duncan was the superstar head chef who never actually cooked anymore and Macbeth was the sous chef, doing all the work but staying out of the limelight. Lady Macbeth was the hostess. The other thanes were cooks. So you've got ambition; you've got guys who're good with knives. Awesome. [And, yes I just watched Scotland, PA the other night. Again, a wild adaptation that works.]

So with this bumping around in my noodle, I thought about an all-female adaptation of Macbeth. I gathered some of last year's seniors together (to make sure no answers were tainted by someone bucking for a part) and asked them to think of situations when women were competitive and even violently so. I floated my suggestion -- girls school, Lacrosse Team.

They admitted it was clever, but they also laughed their asses off. Okay, close, but not it. Then one of them said, "When you said girls school, I thought you meant women's college, and I expected you to say professors." And there it was -- too good to pass up.

And now I'm trying to make it work by changing as little of the script as I can. And it's actually pretty cool for the first half of the play. But once you get to the second half where people are planning for war, the conceit wears a little thin. Honestly, I'm afraid I leapt before I looked carefully enough. I don't know if the whole thing will hold together. We'll see.

Right now I'm annotating the script. I don't trust my students to look things up, plus it's a good way to make sure I understand everything that's being said. On Thursday, I realized that I've been misreading the "If it were done when t'is done, than t'were well it were done quickly" speech all these years. Now instead of it sort of making sense, it makes perfect sense. Oh, and Act IV, Scene iii is now my favorite scene in the show. The first half is really quite outrageous, and I don't think I've ever seen anyone really play the sense of those words before.