"Macbeth"
Shakespeare
Portland Actors Ensemble
Shakespeare-in-the-Parks, June-July 2006
Photo by Carole Barkley
For Portland Actors Ensemble's 2006 "Twilight Tragedie" of "Macbeth," director Jeremy Lillie went for a gang motif: we wore black, leather jackets and a few chains, and military-style boots.
The show was staged in Pettygrove Park, an urban space surrounded by tall office buildings and condos, but marked by four tall hills over which scenes could take place (and down the rear of which dead bodies could roll, so we didn't have the challenge of carting them off stage!), and other hills or berms around the back of which we could sneak to get to our entrances from the changing tent behind the audience.
Since it was a night show, and since my character, Macduff, doesn't really come on until later in the play, when the daylight was nearly gone, I don't really have any photos that show me in action. These shots were posed "backstage" before one of the performances.
In the early scenes, I doubled as one of King Duncan's grooms in the early scenes. His appearance is shown at left.
I'm very sorry I don't have any photographic evidence from lengthy Act IV, scene iii, in which Macduff and Malcolm (who in this production was a daughter of Duncan, played by Rae Kramer), discuss kingly virtues and vices, and then the news is brought to Macduff that his wife and children have been slaughtered by Macbeth. I collapsed in shock against the broad chest of Sokrates Frantzis, who played Rosse as a sort of consigliere/lawyer to Macbeth with a briefcase, and then I bellowed Macduff's grief to the skies (or rather, to the surrounding apartment buildings, poor folks).
There were other folks in the show, of course. Here is a shot of the title couple, played by Brian Rooney and Christy Hernquist (at the time; now she goes by her birth name, Christy Drogosch).
Here's a story that will appeal only to actors and Shakespeare fanatics. Before each entrance, in every play, I run through my opening lines in my head so they'll be ready to hand once I'm on stage. Fairly late in the play (Act V, scene iv), the army of Malcolm, which includes Macduff, Siward, Lennox, Ross, and others, comes on briefly, and Malcolm makes his famous decision to have his entire army disguise themselves with tree branches from the Wood of Birnam. It's a short scene, made even shorter in our production by the cutting of half the lines in it, but even so, my character has only one brief speech:
Let our just censures
Attend the true event, and put we on
Industrious soldiership.
Setting aside the tongue-twisting last line, there was one night when I was trying to run through this short speech while we waited in the trees to go on, and I could not remember the word "censures." I knew something with two syllables was supposed to go there, but couldn't call it to mind. So I made the conscious choice to insert another two-syllable word in its place, and my speech became:
Let our just desserts
Attend the true event, and put we on
Industrious soldiership.
It came out so smoothly that hardly anyone in the audience likely noticed the change, but a moment later, when we had trooped offstage again, Atticus Mowry, who was a soldier in that scene, punched me in the arm and said he had almost burst out laughing on stage when he heard that come out of my mouth.
The witches were done up in sort of post-apocalyptic punk garb, and played by Eleanor Cohn-Eichner, Kelsey Wingate, and Nicole Turley, shown below:
There was one other cool photo that came out of this production. One night a photographer that had been hired by the local metropolitan transit system, Trimet, came by to shoot events that might be used in future advertising -- to show the variety of events one might get to see if one traveled about the city by bus, train, and streetcar. He ended up posing Macbeth and me before the show in our climactic swordfight against the sunset -- not in a location where it would have taken place in the show, but in a back alley behind the "set," which we normally used to move around between scenes.
That's Brian as Macbeth on the left, and me as Macduff on the left. The photo, by J. Carter Dunham, copyright Polara Studios, is used here by permission.
WHAT THEY SAID
"Purists will undoubtedly shudder at the updates director Jeremy Lillie has made to one of Shakespeare's most popular works. The main storyline about Macbeth's bloodthirsty quest for power remains the same, but in this version contemporary urban mobsters replace Scottish historical figures. ... Brian Rooney ... says he doesn't fit preconceived notions of what Macbeth should look like. 'People think of a large man, a warrior,' he explains. 'But Macbeth doesn't need to be the strongest because he's so focused." -- Stephen Blair, Just Out, June 16, 2006
"MacBudget: See Portland Actors Ensemble do the Scottish play -- free. Shakespeare's classic tale of witchcraft, revenge, and kilts, kilts, kilts!" -- Willamette Week calendar listings, June 21, 2006
[although there were plenty of bodies, nobody got kilt; I had the paper correct this erroneous listing in the next issue]