The play this weekend brings to life the traditional Shakespeare story with innovative undergraduate vision
Macbeth co-directors Riley Bartlebaugh and Sean Patrick Forsythe are co-Shakespeare enthusiasts with a penchant for the unusual.
While Forsythe, a senior theatre major, longed to direct a nearly impossible campus-wide production of Hamlet, Bartlebaugh, a senior English and theatre major, felt drawn to Macbeth done in repertoire.
The resulting sold-out production as part of the theater, dance and performance studies school’s Second Season — works created by students to help their “entrepreneurial endeavors,” according to The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center’s website — is a bit of both.
“When it came time for Second Season proposals, we decided to do a walk-around Macbeth with four people,” Forsythe said.
Their Macbeth is a showcase of the creative energy and untapped talent of the undergraduate students who produced it. This roving production allows audience members to physically experience the play’s shifting settings.
Instead of watching scenery change from a seated position, the audience adopts a more exploratory role and travels from the battlefield to the halls of Scottish castles — or in this case, from the Cafritz Foundation Theater to the light lab — along with the cast. Hallways, stairwells and passages between rooms are fair game as well, for Macbeth, at least in this production, cannot be confined to a single space.
“It’s been helpful that our text has as wide of a scope as it does,” Forsythe said.
Inspired by both Sleep No More from British theater company Punchdrunk, known for its immersive theater, and Bedlam’s four-person Hamlet and Saint Joan mashup, the pair found a middle ground that is anything but moderate.
The show tests both the limitations the audience and the limitations of theater. Though theater typically requires a defined space and tradition dictates that space take a stage-like format, this Second Season play cuts down convention with the avant-garde edge of student ambition.
“I hope that young artists that come see this play look at this and say, ‘Hey, I don’t have to worry about not having a traditional theater space,’” Forsythe said. “‘I can do a play in a hallway. I can do a play in a stairwell.’”
The powerful adaptation relies heavily on the prowess of its four actors. Bartlebaugh and Forsythe ruled out an over-produced piece upon realizing that sometimes, less is more.
The play is in the raw space that The Clarice provided for the project, sans any fancy scenery or background trickery.
The directors held auditions late last year and began rehearsals earlier this month. Immediately, Bartlebaugh and Forsythe posed the auditionees with a daunting task: fill five roles with four actors.
“With their bodies and their characterization, they had to figure out how to put five characters on the stage,” Bartlebaugh said. “[That vision] has been integrated with the actors from the beginning.”
This production is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s original text. Bartlebaugh and Forsythe cut and edited the famous work to fit their vision and cast size. In their presentation, the three witches plague Macbeth in his torturous afterlife and force him to revisit his egregious wrongs, which manifest through the traditional play format.
“I want [audience members] to realize just how terrible the character Macbeth is,” Forsythe said. “[Macbeth] is taught so much, and it’s so ubiquitous that people forget that Macbeth is a war criminal and has committed atrocities to get his way to an undeserved end. That’s an emphasis that we’ve put on this play.”
For Bartlebaugh, who fell in love with the play at a summer-long training program, the adaptation process was “very freeing.”
“It’s very accepted to edit Shakespeare,” she said, “so I didn’t feel super obligated to the text, but I did feel obligated to the story, so it was all about streamlining.”
The four actors and actresses were left to their own devices to prepare for the upcoming performance over the winter break, according to Conor Scanlan, who plays the conscience-torn Macbeth. From there, the experience was collaborative.
“We just dove right into it from day one,” said Scanlan, a senior theatre major. “It’s been fascinating since it’s a traveling show.”
Because the performance moves throughout The Clarice, each setting posed a new blocking challenge that the cast worked through with the directors. Bartlebaugh and Forsythe provided their notes; the actors did the rest.
“We came to the rehearsals with blocking ideas, we gave them notes, but we still gave them lots of freedom to bring in what they thought about the characters and how they wanted to do it,” Forsythe said.
One cast member even imbued a magical element with her personal knowledge of dance and choreography.
“She came in with these really amazing movement phrases,” Forsythe said. “Riley and I couldn’t have done that. We don’t know how to do that.”
The result of their cooperation is a refreshing and delightful Macbeth that defies the word ‘amateur.’
“We treat it professionally, and that’s the key,” Scanlan said. “We’re taking this absolutely seriously, and that will show up in our work.”