Post-Election / "Macbeth" by Invictus Theatre Company

It has taken me a good portion of time to start writing out this draft. Invictus Theatre Company kindly offered me a Monday night admittance, so I could write on their production of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. For months, my partner and I had moaned in search of storefront Shakespeare, so when the opportunity arose to step in under the chandelier of the Windy City Playhouse for Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy, I became instantly eager. A real playbill is put into my hands, real collected greenery lines the walls of the dark set, immediately cluing us in to the quality of production that is to be imparted onto us. Bird sounds are barely audible over the bustle. Thunder booms over conversation. And unavoidable to observe are our witches, the apples of my eyes, as there is no better way to enter into a context of tragedy.

Every time I consume Shakespearean entertainment content, there’s this little voice in my head that I would absorb the narrative easier if I had read and analyzed the playwright more often. In my recent interactions with M.L. Rio’s novel If We Were Villains and Sandbox Collective’s production of Richard II, I tried not to let it become a you’re-not-good-enough voice, but the more often it appears, the more insistent it grows. I was able to breeze through this genre in AP English in high school, when did it fall out of my mind? In fact, my first time experiencing Macbeth at all was also as a teenager, and then too was I inspired to write in reflection on the actors’ interpretation of their characters. I felt a little better seeing myself when reading a Shakespeare adaptation from a garage sale, as there was a little penciled handwritten note in the back asserting “I’d like to be an expert.” A woman in front of me pulls a bottle of white wine out of her purse and pours her friend a cup, connecting over this writer hundreds of years after his death.

Lights glue us to the spot in danger and urgency. The witches are perfect, the alternative stars of the script, forcing us into a status of analysis immediately. Chainmail glints and jingles. Real metal clinks; these are stage swords, but real metalcraft is at work here. The audience reacts strongly to what feels like a 4-D experience as the violence coats the stage floor with medieval blood. It’s scary and loud, heartracing lighting and sound design. Creepy, cool, and conceptual, the writing like listening to another language. Every character needs a flaw, every character has a moment, some reflexes of their personality. But as our title commands, the focus pushes closest on one Scottish official in particular.

The red light of the setting beats along with Macbeth’s amplified heartbeat. Imperative to a production of this story, Mikha’el Amin narrates Macbeth’s descent in all-control of the face, in a strong voice. In his “Let me grasp it!” dagger soliloquy, we saw simultaneously the meticulously planned nature of every moment, every word, and the actor submerge entirely into the bloody character. When Macbeth leans toward the audience, regarding us, he is positioned with a stage light right under his chin – it is reminiscent of the old cartoonish gesture of a campfire narrator of a ghost story. But as he speaks out, his eyes sink into his face, his cheekbones gaunt and skeletal, teeth becoming black in his mouth. Sweat or spit even drips off his chin, and the horrifying mask is complete. I leaned in from two or three rows back, but the first row squirmed in their seats, and likely in their beds when trying to clear their minds of this horrible, humanless image. I write and speak often on the prowess of actors to be able to boisterously evoke the human emotions of their character, but the mastery of what Director Sarafina Vecchio and our Macbeth Mikha’el Amin have created in this moment is integral to the truth of this play, as all humanity is stripped. A monster only, Macbeth is a man no longer, and we are no longer safe from him.

This work is about cycles. Internal and external, personal and political, deceit and deception, revenge and revenge on revenge. When a king emerges, jealousy and doubt bubbles, and is then removed – even in the end as the cast bows before the final ruler Malcolm, the actors’ stoicism looks out into his royal future, one that has only been lined with murder, intense and painful. Revenge becomes revenge on revenge when we see a challenger to the spiral in Michael B. Woods’ Macduff. A harrowing presentation of his family’s murder, dark and quieting, leeching with urgency and panic, leads into Macduff emerging into the audience’s attention through the intoxicating fog of Macbeth’s character. Michael B. Woods delivers a silencing reaction in his crisis of grief, the tempo and attention to breath perfecting a complete shift in the sympathies of the fiction. Since the first murder, we follow Macbeth, rooting for his misdeeds, but the space held in the perspective shift leads to the rise of a worthy rival to the true villain. To successfully contend with Macbeth’s evil, Macduff must stand to a height where we can see him, and this rendition was towering to say the least.

Why do we still examine Shakespeare? We all know the storylines, we know how they will end. Every version becomes an adaptation. Why does it still draw our attention? Shakespeare is all around us, even now. See: Rachel Zeigler and Jack Antonoff’s Romeo & Juliet  on Broadway recently. See: Drunk Shakespeare on Wabash in our own River North. Even that Sydney Sweeney Much Ado About Nothing rom-com adaptation. Obviously, we can still connect to it – it can still shake something loose in us, as with Invictus’s production. When house managing in this industry, I run into volunteer ushers called the Saints very often and even cornered one recently as I gushed about Macbeth, desperate to discuss the experience with someone, anyone. Even more satisfying was that she agreed with me, noting without prompting that she had been in the front row as Mikha’el Amin’s seemingly eyeless face hovered in front of her during the dagger soliloquy I previously mentioned. She also agreed with the observation of the scare level of the production, the sting of Banquo’s ghost, the Macduff murders, and Hecate’s possession of the witches – the audience tittered and shivered when recalling during intermission. This is the effect of continued re-introduction to Shakespeare, and what theatre companies like Invictus try to remind us, the need to analyze, to reimagine and connect to others over shared experiences. We give these theatre companies license to determine the creative entertainment programming of their communities and beyond, and we trust and hope that they will provide us something worthwhile. Not only is it a worthy take on the most popular tragedy of all time, but Invictus Theatre Company has included Monday night discount pricing, post-show directorial talkbacks, sword-fighting workshops, and by reaching out to creators and journalists in the area has fostered outreach and awareness to neighborhood theatres outside the realm of the blockbuster theatre district of the Loop. Every theatre company puts measures like these together in their own ways, and Invictus has arranged their own leaves beautifully.

Postscript. We all look for a Macduff in the world. One among the oppressed, to overthrow the oppressor with the fiery light of justice. We see Macduff in leaders that we want to trust, expecting that their triumph will lead to ease in our suffering. But blue or red, Macduff is still a rich noble, and he still murders to achieve his goals. Malcolm is still just the son of a king, and will either be murdered or produce offspring to lead to the next king. Do we bend to these cycles, the cautionary unending tale of Macbeth, or do we become like the witches, voluntary servants to a more practical and truth-bringing reality? The outside perspective may see them as deviants to their society, but are they a branch blocking the cog, or a rejector of it entirely? Those who see themselves as the witches, are they the obstacle of change or the catalyst of it? Can one really argue that they are not the cause, the oil, the manipulator that leads to every major action depicted in their story? I will never stop asking these questions. We will never truly have the answers. We’ll just have to keep staging Shakespeare until we figure it out.