This newsletter begins on Sunday, before the “Eclipse of America”, sorry for the delay—it’s as if time itself has eclipsed.
I expected to keep writing about resurrection—especially today when I heard what I thought was a squirrel crack a twig behind me and was met in the eyes with a young buck enjoying his breakfast in a cemetery. Who was he? How was his reincarnation?
It wasn’t just last week’s exploration of Easter and menstrual Jesus, but eclipse season and the portal between the lunar and solar eclipse that keeps me visualizing a birth canal, awaiting whatever this symbolic reincarnation brings. It is spring, and this time feels more rejuvenating than it has, perhaps in a long time.
On Friday night, I found myself falling asleep during a play for the first time since I was 17 and slept through the New York City Ballet. For some reason, I cannot forget this nap or the NYU interview that coincided with it in which someone from the drama department flat-out said: “I wasn’t ready to leave California.” After this, I didn’t leave California for over a decade. I suppose what we say to teenagers matters.
But here I was, at 35 four days before total solar eclipse (which has particular weight because another totality won’t align on this continent for another 20 years) falling asleep during Macbeth (an undoing). As the name suggests, the Scottish play is Scottish and is a retelling of sorts of the original tragedy.
I think the portal of Eclipse season is the perfect time to think about Macbeth—a tragedy so cursed the title remains unsayable in a theater. Behind us, in line, as we climbed these stairs at Theater for a New Audience, a man said, “I was going to see Monkey Man or this.” The woman he was with assured him he’d made the right choice.
Zinne Harris’ Macbeth (an undoing) is being called a “bold reinterpretation” of Shakespeare’s briefest play, which is known for its life-altering curse and the power of tragedy, no matter how brief. I can say that working on Macbeth in my 20s did not leave me unscathed, but it’s talking about Macbeth, particularly Lady M with grad students, that keeps me grounded in a play so overtly menstrual I can’t help but love it.
It is both the ambiguity of Lady M’s infertility/child loss and the invisible spot of blood alongside her “unsexing” that worms its way into me, perhaps in a similar way it did for Frances McDormand who dreamed of playing Lady M for decades. Watching Macbeth (an undoing) I wondered what Fran might think—was this the character who captivated her, or was she a hologram, a replica, or one of those public domain classics poorly reprinted and cheaply bound and sold on Amazon?
(Lots of spoiler alerts and digressions below)
The play immediately digresses from verse, but not in the way one might come to expect with a writer like Anne Carson, whose Greek translations are simple, bold, and often brash. In Harris’ text, some of the original lines remain, fragments of themselves paired with updated language that honestly makes the play longer and harder to follow as if the audience is tasked with reading two books at once. I found it difficult to move between the lines I knew and the lines that felt like a different language. Sometimes in classes, we talk about not dumbing things down, or assuming a reader can’t handle the writer’s reality. I wish we would still give this thought to Shakespeare, or even verse.
The show is framed by a comedic crone who plays a castle servant, and one of the weird sisters—who in this play behave as a conjured idea of witches that feel very Netflix The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina while Lady M protests they are normal women. There is a lot of energy given to Lady M denying the three sisters have any supernatural power while the men are convinced they are witches. Highlighting this lack of ambiguity might be a nod at Lady M attempting to keep the women safe, however we also learn in the play she treats them pretty poorly after her fifth child dies in infancy. It was all just a little too much. A little too overt and complicated.
The amazing thing about Lady M, the real one, is that yes—she always had the power—in the same way the weird sisters who only tell the truth of what is happening in the play are deemed as witches. It’s the pure power of what a woman says that unhinges Macbeth. The tragedy is tyranny. It’s a lack of correction. It is not that Lady M is evil, it is that they both give up something of themselves (unsexing/gender transforming) to become tyrants, and in turn they suffer.
Call me old fashioned, but I want to walk away from a tragedy feeling, well the weight of tragedy. The crone carries the audience through what we’re told will be the same tale with blood and gore to meet our desires because that is what an audience has come to love. It’s not until act two that the “undoing”, or perhaps the unsexing finally occurs when Macbeth is cursed with insomnia, Lady M takes control of the king’s office and is thus referred to as male by Ross and Lenox. She immediately appears insane to them as her identity as a woman in power disappears in front of her. This is normal. Did we need the lines? I think we all know men generally think there is something WRONG when a woman takes a role of power.
Watching the play, I thought a lot about what makes a play “feminist”. I thought about how little we claim feminism because it’s misconstrued. A student said recently, “Everyone I know is a feminist because everyone having equal rights is pretty much a no-brainer for a lot of my generation.” It was hard to explain that generationally feminism, apparently like Lady M has unravelings, interpretations, and political priorities.
It seemed, that what (an undoing) tried to do, was turn the play on the playwright. In the opening monologue, the crone says something like “The play hasn’t changed.” After the play, we thought—do plays change? Do plays change after a playwright is dead? What does it mean to change a play not to comment on a system or state but on a long-dead playwright?
A new relationship between Lady M and Lady MacDuff emerges in (an undoing). Cousins, who call each other sister, we quickly learn that Lady M wants MacDuff’s unborn child because she’s lost so many children. It is the ambiguity of miscarriage, conception, and menstruation that makes Lady M who she is—what her body has been through that leads her to choose unsexing and power over, perhaps, trying again. Making her child loss overt, even countable wasn’t relatable, it was extreme. It didn’t make her desire to take her cousin’s child plausible, it only revealed she was probably not a feminist and this play probably wasn’t either.
The play felt as if the Macbeths had made a deal with the Devil, but we never knew the Devil arrived until Ross and Lenox brought out a straight jacket and gag. It became a fairytale in which the structure didn’t align. Lady Macbeth wanted us on her side (made even more clear by breaking the fourth wall. We’re not supposed to side with Lady M. Right? Am I misremembering Macbeth?
As the unraveling continued, the lens was turned back on Lady M who was found to be insane and the play ended in a far more disturbing end than the original. For a brief moment, I thought I was watching the death of Desdemona as if eclipse season had caused a character convergence of the eternal maiden and the unsexed hag. Surely, the real Lady M could never be overpowered by her husband. That’s why she’s always been the one in control. It’s not being a woman that makes her a villain, it is the lengths to which she will go, her becoming other than herself that, perhaps, is only balanced by her suicide. It instead became a scene of domestic violence, a bedroom drama that left the new king, poor apathetic Malcolm mopping blood from the floor.
What does it mean to be a feminist play? How can we critique without breaking the fourth wall? Or if we do break the fourth wall, as they did in Macbeth (an undoing), can we allow the audience to participate? Will that make a feminist play? Where is the play about the Weird Sisters? Where is the play about Lady MacDuff? Where is the tangent of the original? What makes a critique?
The original Macbeth never aims to say that patriarchy is okay—it warns of the dangers and uses a time of long ago to point to the very real and immediate dangers of tyranny, what a lust for power can do to an individual, a couple, but not so much a country, if the end to tyranny is swift. It implicates the system, shining a light on unchecked power, which perhaps is what feminist theater should do.