Taking Shakespeare in Stride: Lady Macbeth at the American Repertory Theatre

ABSTRACT

Macbeth in Stride, a live ‘concert play’, created an assemblage of original dialogue, R&B, gospel, and rock music, and ‘Shakespeare fragments’ to put Lady Macbeth into action as a figure of Black feminine desire and ambition. Yet, rather than read Lady Macbeth as a ‘universal’ figure—the problematic of which scholars of performance, casting, and adaptation have theorized—this production used three distinct, overlapping characters to suggest Lady Macbeth’s resonance with gendered and racialized experience as well as the Shakespearean text’s entanglement with structures of oppression circumscribing those experiences. Creator Whitney White performed ‘Woman’, Lady Macbeth, and (I argue) an implied character bridging the gap between them: Lady M. Lady M.’s musical numbers provided a shared subjectivity for both Woman and Lady Macbeth, embodying a dialectic between performing Shakespeare and performing Blackness. So, too, Macbeth in Stride suggested a pedagogical paradigm for taking Shakespeare in stride. Staging acts of reading in and for Black communities, the show invited audiences to locate themselves in the text while acknowledging the ways in which the text failed to accommodate them. To take Shakespeare in stride is to see and shift the forces that frustrate both reparative reading and gender and racial equality.

KEYWORDS:

• Macbeth
• performance
• adaptation
• race
• gender
• pedagogy

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All references are to the Macbeth in Stride recorded performance, courtesy of the American Repertory Theater archive and in accordance with Actor’s Equity regulations.

2 All references are to The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd edition.

3 Duffley, ‘Art Not Without Ambition’.

4 Thompson, Passing Strange.

5 Because the musical numbers are not listed in the program and the Macbeth in Stride script was not present in the A.R.T. archive at the time of this essay, I have supplied these descriptive titles.

6 Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’, 144.

7 Fazel and Geddes, Variable Objects, 2.

8 Duffley, ‘Art Not Without Ambition’. Macbeth in Stride Digital Program.

9 Macbeth in Stride Digital Program.

10 Thompson, Colorblind Shakespeare; Akhimie, ‘Strange Episodes’; Corredera, ‘“How Dey Goin’ to Kill Othello?!”‘; Dadabhoy, ‘Wincing at Shakespeare’; Espinosa, ‘Stranger Shakespeare’; Herrera, Latin Numbers; and Rogers, British Black and Asian Shakespeareans.

11 Genette, Palimpsests. See Henderson and O’Neill, Shakespeare and Adaptation.

12 Carlson, Haunted Stage. See Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception.

13 Newstok and Thompson, Weyward Macbeth, 5.

14 Newstok and Thompson, Weyward Macbeth, 6-7; Kolin, ‘“Black up again”‘, 219-20.

15 Akhimie, ‘Strange Episodes’, 373; Corredera,’“How Dey Goin’ to Kill Othello?!”‘, 27-8; Dadabhoy, ‘Wincing at Shakespeare’, 83; Rycroft 29-30; Thompson, Passing Strange 69–96

16 Henderson, Collaborations with the Past; Lanier, ‘Shakespearean Rhizomatics’; Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation; Desmet, Loper, and Casey, Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare.

17 Thompson, Passing Strange, 70.

18 Thompson, Passing Strange, 11.

19 The ‘Anti-Racism and Accountability’ page on the A.R.T. website first posted a release on May 31, 2020. Eight releases have appeared since; the most recent was posted on November 18, 2021.

20 Hodgdon, Shakespeare Trade.

21 Duffley, ‘Art Not Without Ambition’.

22 Moschovakis, ‘Reading Macbeth’, 66.

23 Erickson and Hall, ‘A New Scholarly Song’, 5.

24 Thompson, Passing Strange, 11.

25 Duffley, ‘Art Not Without Ambition’.

26 Fazel and Geddes, Shakespeare User, 3. See Bennett, Vibrant Matter; Haraway, ‘Cyborg Manifesto’.

27 Fazel and Geddes, Variable Objects, 2.

28 Fazel and Geddes, Variable Objects, 2; Henderson, Collaborations with the Past, 33.

29 Dadabhoy, ‘Wincing at Shakespeare’, 85.

30 Henderson, Collaborations with the Past, 25.

31 Thompson, Passing Strange, 11.

32 Newstok and Thompson, Weyward Macbeth, 6; 239-52.

33 Kolin, ‘“Black up again”‘, 211; Gainey-O’Toole and Alexander, ‘Three Weyward Sisters’, 205-10.

34 Tillet, ‘Ruth Negga’.

35 Tillet, ‘Ruth Negga’.

36 Thompson, Passing Strange, 18.

37 Hodgdon, Shakespeare, Performance, and the Archive, 5-6.

38 Herrera, Latin Numbers, 6; 16.

39 Herrera, Latin Numbers, 13.

40 Rogers, British Black and Asian Shakespeareans, 3.

41 Lanier, ‘Shakespeare and Adaptation Theory’, 49.

42 Thompson, Passing Strange, 11.

43 Gainey-O’Toole and Alexander, ‘Three Weyward Sisters’, 206.

44 Gainey-O’Toole and Alexander, ‘Three Weyward Sisters’, 209. See Clifton, Good Woman, 111.

45 Cahill and Hall, ‘Shakespeare and Black America’, 8.

46 Dadabhoy, ‘Wincing at Shakespeare’, 83-4.

47 Espinosa, ‘Stranger Shakespeare’, 56.

48 Espinosa, ‘Stranger Shakespeare’, 66.

49 Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’, 150-1.