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Prosies - got me some culture
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Prosies
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August 6, 2003 Shakespeare in the park last night. It was MacBeth. I saw it with three women I've known for almost four years now—no, I take that back. I've known Sooz since 1999, and met the other two directly through her. Then there was someone else I've never met before, who came along because he found Sooz's Free Agent Boston site and ended up on her mailing list. The weather was absolutely perfect for the performance. It threatened rain the whole time. There were even a few drops of it, and of course I left my umbrella on the Common. The audience was even better. There was this group of gaggly teenage girls sitting to the right and center of us, part of some summer program called, I believe, "Upward Bound." It sounds like the kind of program someone might have tried to enroll me in as a teenager. You know the type: take a bunch of "economically disadvantaged teenagers" (translation: poor city kids) and engage them in educational, culturally stimulating activities that teach them cooperation and leadership skills (translation: keep them off the streets for the summer and maybe teach them a thing or two). At one point, the volume of their conversation actually vied with poor Glamis's soliloquy on whether or not it's really okay to kill your king. I shushed them, and one of them said "sssh yourself!" It's a good thing they did eventually quiet down, or I would have had to get up off my blanket and open up a can of shush-ass on their butts. Later, Shannon told me that the cause of all the furor was that Marcus had a gun! Hey, who cares about bloody hands, dead kings, and ghostly apparitions at dinner parties when you've got a real live classmate with a gun? The Back Bay Vagrant also entertained us with various la-la-las as he orbited the performance space. During the famous porter scene, when there's a whole lot of knocking at the gate, he kept saying "Who's there?" in a very loud voice. Now that's Elizabethan-style theater! And finally, when the Eveel King learned of his poor mad Queen's suicide, he was in the midst of his speech about life being a poor player strutting and fretting on the stage when someone vroomed right down Tremont on his potato-potato Harley Davidson. Jay Sanders, the actor who was playing MacBeth, was a consummate professional. He didn't miss a beat, just paused, breathed deeply, waited for the noise to subside. It could have been timed. "It is a tale told by an idiot," he continued, "full of sound and fury." I found two things particularly interesting about this interpretation of the play: First, I noticed the role of the three witches in a whole new way. They were omnipresent in this production, almost constantly on stage. At the very beginning of the production, Duncan (the old King) is depicted in church, with three Virgin figures on kind of moveable carts. The witches remove these Virgin figures and then take their places. The symbolism is that they are somehow more earthy, bloody representations of the Goddess, the fates, ones with a much less benign sense of morality. The three witches are Kali-Ma, the terrible mother, rather than Isis, the benificent. Second, there is a line where I believe it is MacDuff says "I would play the woman with my eyes," meaning, I suppose, that he would cry. But instead he goes off to war and kills MacBeth. Interesting view of womanhood, and very much in tune with the dichotomous way that men throughout western history have viewed us. They fear our power. They fear our emotions. And yet they sanitize us, place us on pedestals. At the end of the play, the three witches stand among the soldiers, their hands bright with blood. I think of childbirth, of menstruation. At the beginning of the play, they were weeping and moaning in the aftermath of war. And the men all draw their phallic swords and call the name of the new king. :: sigh ::
Plus ça change, plus ça reste le même.
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