Joan Marcus Photo
Whitney White in Macbeth in Stride.
When we first meet Lady Macbeth in Macbeth, one of Shakespeare’s best-known and often-staged tragedies, she seems designed to steal the show. Her speeches are riveting, her emotions keyed up and powerful. When her husband Macbeth, the Thane of Glamis promoted to Thane of Cawdor, arrives home, she delivers more drama, prodding his dithering into regicide, and even shows him how it should be done when it comes to implicating the two guards that Macbeth and his Lady have drugged.
All this Whitney White — in her show Macbeth in Stride, now playing for one week only at Yale Repertory Theatre through Dec. 14 — delivers with musing commentary. Then comes a coronation that looks like it could be featured on “Lifestyles of the Rich and Murderous.” After that triumph, what next for our ambitious queen? As White, who wrote the show and performs the lead (called “Woman”) in the piece, flatly states: “She gets to host a dinner party.”
If you’ve ever thought, while watching a production of Macbeth or reading the text, “wait, what about Lady Macbeth?” this show’s for you.
Macbeth in Stride began as a cabaret show mixing Shakespeare’s speeches with songs, then was developed as part of a projected series to interrogate key female roles in Shakespeare’s plays. Daniel Soule’s set indicates this is going to be a concert: drum kit, keyboards, guitars, sound equipment, walkways, exposed lighting. Given the title, we might expect a rock revamping of Macbeth, a classic play about a Scottish warrior whose murders to win and maintain power make him a haunted, vengeful tyrant — and his wife, who aids his rise to power and suffers from what he becomes.
Directed by Taibi Magar and Tyler Dobrowsky, Macbeth in Stride effectively complements the action of Shakespeare’s play and the commentary in White’s with songs that drop in and out as a heady means to kick the energy up a notch, mostly up-tempo and funky (Barbara “Muzikaldunk” Duncan, drums). The musical revue aspects of the show make the interplay between music and drama a key expressive factor, letting White and her company find their voices to express what confronting Macbeth makes them feel.
Throughout the show, White gets to indulge an opportunity many of us might like to have: to question and restage aspects of a dramatic character who both attracts and repels, who inspires and frustrates. But White’s commentary is more pointed. Her questioning comes from the viewpoint of a Black actor wrestling with Shakespeare’s characters and situations as examples of an exclusionary culture that, when it allows Black and Brown people into prized roles, expects them to play their parts without asking questions that disturb or disrupt the play’s assumptions.
White brings great presence to the stage. She has a magnificent singing voice, a way with glam outfits, and a genuine love for the play she’s questioning, told in the force with which she delivers Lady Macbeth’s many great lines. She’s abetted by the three Witches (Holli’ Conway, Phoenix Best, Ciara Alyse Harris) poised here as fascinating backup singers and dancers with an unusual amount of sass and agency. Choreographer Raja Feather Kelly makes the Witches’ every motion articulate, and Qween Jean’s costumes and Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew’s lighting design provide plenty of visual sparkle.
The Witches here are implicated in ways reminiscent of a Greek chorus, giving support to Woman, but also wryly questioning or undermining her ambitions. There’s a provocative overlap between Woman’s bloody effort to wield power in the play, as Lady Macbeth, and her groping efforts to wield power over Shakespeare’s play, in Macbeth in Stride.
Shortly before that dinner party that goes off the rails with disruption, the Witches “take five” and ask for the audience’s help in getting us up to speed. “What can you tell us about Macbeth?” they ask a volunteer (on opening night, K.D. said words to the effect of “it all goes badly from where you left off”). The trio seems to know that Woman, in trying to remake Lady Macbeth into a diva or role model or cautionary tale, is going to have a hard sell. While Woman wants to overwrite Lady M’s “going mad” into a more righteous and empowering “getting mad,” ultimately, “the play’s the thing wherein we catch the conscience of the king” — and of his despairing queen as well.
Recasting Lady M as a contentious Black woman who wants to speak for a collective seems aimed to provoke backlash and simultaneously stimulate different possibilities of identification. The “him” in the play is called “Man” (Charlie Thurston), a hunky, swaggering hot dude with tats and leather and eyeliner who shrugs at one point that he’s not sure “what a man is.” It’s a worthwhile comment, but White’s play lacks the nerve to remake the relation between Man and Woman and stage for us some of what Shakespeare’s play doesn’t show. There are places where Macbeth in Stride almost walks away with the characters, but keeps coming back to what Shakespeare made them say.
White’s effort to investigate the power dynamics of Macbeth — and of theater in the U.S. — can seem a bit scattershot. Some jibes about patriarchal assumptions in the canon of Dead White Males feel dated, while gripes about being passed over for ingenue parts can seem like apologies for the machinations of show business. Meanwhile, removing any sense of the fourth wall by inviting comments from the audience — asking us “what do you want?” — lets our current world into the play. Watching Macbeth in Stride after the recent presidential election might jar us into unscripted thoughts when we see a self-conscious Black woman on stage say she wants power, and getting it might mean killing an (old, White) absolute monarch.
“Something wicked this way comes,” as the Witches say. But Lady M likes to say that “things without all remedy should be without regard: what’s done is done.”
Macbeth in Stride runs at Yale Repertory Theatre, 1120 Chapel St., through Dec. 14. For tickets and more information, visit Yale Rep’s website.