Hot on the snowy heels of Eric Ting’s production of It’s a Wonderful Life, which opened this week, The Long Wharf Theatre has announced the cast for Ting’s impending production of Macbeth 1969, Jan. 18- Feb. 12 on the selfsame mainstage. Several familiar faces may catch your eye.
Ting has reconceived Shakespeare’s Macbeth as a sort of fever dream affecting a solder in a VA hospital during the time of the war of the Viet Nam. The six-person cast handles all the roles in the play, and are labeled “Soldier 1 (McKinley Belcher III), Soldier 2 (Barret O’Brien), Nurse 1 (Socorro Santiago), Nurse 2 (Shirine Babb), Nurse 3 (Jackie Chung) and Politician (George).” Soldier 1 is Macbeth, Soldier 2 handles the roles of Banquo and Macduff (who in this context is an anti-war activist and draft dodger), Nurse 2 is Lady Macbeth, Nurse 3 is Lady Macduff. Ting adapted the script himself, and sets Macbeth 1969 on a stormy Christmas eve in a hospital war in “Middle America. An isolated place, far from the war.”
I’m particularly excited to see Barret O’Brien back on a New Haven stage. I raved about him regularly during his student years at the Yale School of Drama, where he held crowds spellbound as Dionysus in The Bacchae, Peer in Peer Gynt and Prospero in the Tempest.
Socorro Santiago was Aunt May in Ting’s production of John Patrick Shanley’s Italian-American Reconciliation last season.
George Kulp is a stalwart performer in the Connecticut small theater scene, active with the New Haven Theatre Company and Theatre Four here in New Haven, Square One Theatre in Stratford and others. You would have just seen him in the NHTC production of Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer had it not been postponed until Spring 2012. Kulp was Hal Turner on the TV soap Ryan’s Hope.
Jackie Chung is a member of New York’s Ensemble Studio Theatre, where she’s taken part in its drama marathons. She’s appeared everywhere from the Flea to the Public to the Ma-Yi Theater company.
Shirine Babb has done a TheatreWorks USA children’s theater tour with Play to Win: The Jackie Robinson Story and lots of Shakespeare, particularly with American Shakespeare Theatre and Old Globe/University of San Diego.
The Macbeth in Macbeth 1969 is McKinley Belcher III, who recently was Tom Robinson in an adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird at the Bay Street Theatre in –Sag Harbor, was the Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice for the Kingsmen Shakespeare Company at California Lutheran University (where he was previously in a production of yes, Macbeth) and appeared in Romeo and Juliet at the Hollywood American Legion Theater.
Macbeth 1969’s set is designed by Brooklyn-based, New Haven-born Yale School of Art & Architecture grad Mimi Lien. Costumes are by Toni-Leslie James, the busy New York designer who did The Bluest Eye with Ting at Long Wharf in 2008 and also did the theater’s recent production of The Old Masters.
Lighting is by Tyler Micoleau, master of the Long Wharf Stage II lighting grid due to his sublimely shadowy Agnes Under the Big Top, Shipwrecked! and The Shoulder; Micoleau also did Good Person of New Haven and The Shoulder on the Long Wharf mainstage and has done tons of regional and Off Broadway lights.
Sound designer Ryan Rumery worked with Ting on his Long Wharf mainstage adaptation of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.