Prithee, see there! Behold! Look! Lo! How say you?: Further Thoughts on Macbeth 1969 at Long Wharf Theatre—and Shame on You If You Haven’t Seen It Yet

My reaction to Macbeth 1969—which has its final few performances this week, closing after the Sunday matinee Feb. 12—was strongly visceral: blinding lights, frantic movement, throbbing drumbeats and heartbeats as harbingers of gunshots.

Most of my critical brethren, I notice, overlooked the visual impact of this production and instead took it as an opportunity to prove they’ve read Macbeth before. I find such nattering textual analysis as boring in theater reviews as I do in theater history texts. Nothing wrong with challenging an actor’s line reading, or a director’s concept, but I’m bewildered by these reviews which willfully ignore some stunning technical effects, or noteworthy performance techniques, in favor of staring at the script or program in your lap. Deal with the show, not the idea of the show, while you still have the show to see, please!

I was barely out of my seat, still walking down the aisle, after the opening night performance of Macbeth 1969 at Long Wharf, when I got into my first animated discussion about what I’d just seen. This led to another discussion, with another person, before I’d even hit the bottom stair. Which led to my being ushered across the auditorium to talk about it some more.

Here I happened to meet Macbeth 1969’s lighting designer, Tyler Micoleau. Before I could even indulge in pleasantries and introduce myself, I blurted out:
“How’d you backlight that snow?!”

I’ll be vague here for those who have not yet seen the production, but when MacDuff (Barret O’Brien) makes his big Act Five entrance (the first we see of him in this adaptation, arriving rather later than he does in the full uncut original script), he is presented with gleaming, overwhelming nature-stoked majesty, a thundering effect sharply and purposefully at odds with the scrawny frame of Macduff himself. The character’s got a backpack and snowshoes strapped to him. He reeks karma.

The moment shows the supernatural forces rising up against the murderous Macbeth at this point in the play, without actually insisting that the audience literally believe in witchcraft or divine vengeance. On another level, the blizzard bit simply jolts you out of your seat. And such jolts occur frequently throughout Macbeth 1969.

Micoleau, who lit Dan Hurlin’s tractor odyssey The Shoulder for Long Wharf Stage II in 1999, told me that an entire side wall of the Macbeth 1969 set (a clinical VA hospital environment designed by Mimi Lien) had to be whisked out of the way just for that 20-second blowout lighting effect. It was worth it. So were the gushes of blood which regularly punctuate this drama of wounded spirits. Each splash has to be expertly cleaned up by the actors portraying the nurses who spout the words of the Weird Sisters.

I don’t always attend the opening night receptions at Long Wharf, which tend to be too civilized and cocktail partyish for me. Substantive discussions about the work at hand just don’t materialize the way they do at, say, the Yale Rep, where you can always count on a grad student or two to deliver a blistering critique or authoritative analysis. I love the debate, see. After Macbeth 1969, I was sure I’d get one. I conversed with the stunned, the stultified, the amused, the bemused. I heard about veterans’ issues with the production and delved into dramaturgical nuance.

Not only, such a range of feelings would draw more and more people to see a show and join the debate. Now, it seems, if something is not perfectly pre-packaged and predictable, audiences stay away. Macbeth 1969, in all its complexity and contradictions, deserves to be a conversation piece, not a curiosity.

I sought out the show’s adaptor/ director (and Long Wharf’s Associate Artistic Director) Eric Ting, to check his own feelings about the reaction to this long-gestating pet project of his. We met for coffee this past Tuesday morning at JoJo’s.

“We’ve been doing talkbacks after every performance,” Ting told me, “and we’ve been getting about 30 people at each of them. I really believe in having that dialogue with the audience.”

“I do admit to a level of cognitive dissonance in the production, which could be hard for people who are not used to seeing theater in that way.” Ting describes a moment he witnesses at every performance, when the audience collectively leans forward and exhales. “It does get relentless towards the end of the show.”

Ting’s doesn’t come off as defensive—he’s simply sharing his own experiences in studying and staging the play—but for every charge that he’s “contrived,” he can counter with a dramaturgical revelation. “People have said, ‘You’re just blaming it all on PTSD,’ but that’s too reductive. People forget that both Macbeth and Banquo are sleepless before [their encounter with] the witches. These are two men who’ve just come back from the war.”

“I am saddened,” the director says, “that the response is keeping people from engaging with the theme of this piece, which is the psychological problems of war.” Ting mentions a man at a talkback who took the production to task for highlighting the war aspect of Macbeth when, the man felt, it’s really a play about “ambition.” Ting senses a “common need to distill each Shakespeare play into a central theme. But you need to realize that every Shakespeare play, except maybe the comedies, is informed by war. There’s a war in the recent past for every character in Shakespeare tragedies. Macbeth has been transformed by war.”

In some respects, Ting feels that terminology might be an issue here. “When you use the phrase ‘Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,’ it has less dramatic impact. It’s a medical condition.” He reels off terms used to describe similar conditions in earlier wars: “Cowardice. Shell shock. Battle fatigue. We weren’t saying PTSD—we were saying “psychological toll from the war.”

There’s a broader labelling issue, too: “One thing we realized is that maybe shouldn’t have named it Macbeth at all,” the director conjectures, then notes that “the choices we were making are generally reflective of traditional productions.”

Macbeth 1969’s interpretation of Lady Macbeth as wracked with guilt over the “this kind of monster she’s unleashed” is hardly a new or extreme one, and is entirely appropriate to an ensemble-based production where a number of characters are given much stronger personalities and motivations than they often receive. The character of Macbeth is deliberately subdued, allowing the other characters to escape from his shadow and be their own selves.

“Some people said they thought the ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow” speech was ‘thrown away,’ and done as if it were no more important than anything else Macbeth was saying. That was intentional on our part. It was our aesthetic choice to make him normal. No bravado. No heroism. That came out our engagement with veterans. It would have been another thing entirely if we hadn’t engaged with the veteran community.”

Long Wharf consulted throughout the rehearsal process with veterans who’d founded their own theater troupe at a nearby VA hospital, and who have used drama therapy for their own psychological dealings with their wartime experiences.

The veterans counseled the director and actors to downplay conventional Hollywood (or Shakespearean) ideas of heroism; they didn’t apply to Viet Nam. The impulse was to humanize the soldiers, not give them superpowers. “These aren’t larger than life people,” Ting says. “They should be the same size as us. They should be us.”

Talking with Ting, I floated a few theories of my own—that people feel more empowered to debate high concepts when applied to Shakespeare than they are when equally bold directorial choices are made regarding newer or lesser known shows. I don’t remember anybody getting snippy when Ting rethought John Patrick Shanley’s shouty romantic comedy Italian-American Reconciliation as a dark, ensemble-based nostalgia-driven dreamscape last season.

We also talked about how Macbeth 1969 was something new for entrenched Long Wharf subscribers—the theater has done just a handful of Shakespeares in its nearly half-century existence—but might have fared differently just a mile away at the Yale School of Drama, which offers several reconceptualized Shakespeares are done every year.

Ting feels he wasn’t pushing the envelope as much as some would suggest. “I’ve been at Long Wharf for eight years now. I don’t set out to do esoteric things for our audience.” He simply has a familiarity with Shakespeare, and with the resources of Long Wharf Theatre, that made Macbeth 1969 seem workable and worthwhile. “I grew up in a household where English was not the first language,” he says. “I once saw a production of King Lear in Korea which was done in three different languages. I grew up respecting the elasticity in Shakespeare’s language. That’s where the natural dialogue [in Macbeth 1969] came from. I wanted it to seem familiar.” I shared my own Macbeth experiences with Ting—as a kid actor in summer stock and college theater, I played Macduff’s son three times before I was 10 years old, in three wildly different productions. Perhaps the best Macbeth I’ve ever seen was Peter Sellars’ production for the Boston Shakespeare Company in the early 1980s, which mirrored Ting’s in that numerous roles in the play were divided among a small fixed unit of performers. Ting used six, Sellars only three—and had the same three actors perform Beckett’s urn-clad one-act Play immediately before illuminating the Scottish play. Local critics and theatergoers are questioning the very concept of having Macbeth in a 20th century hospital, with the witches as nurses, but one of the most popular and acclaimed Macbeths of the past few years—the Tony-winning Patrick Stewart one from 2009, directed by Rupert Goold and filmed for the PBS show Great Performances, used that exact setting. Such provincialism in New Haven unnerves me.

Eric Ting continues to learn from the discussions, debates and reviews Macbeth 1969 has evoked, and welcomes the feedback. But some people, I empathized and lamented, have some odd “ideal” of Shakespeare they can’t shake, and those folks are really hard to reach.

Macbeth 1969 has several more performances—and talkbacks, and debates in the lobby—before it closes on Sunday, Feb. 12. If you’ve talked yourself out of seeing it, you really ought to reconsider. This is a show to see, not read. The historical and military symmetries between Shakespeare and Viet Nam are there, but so is so much else. That freakin’ snowstorm, for instance.