I've wanted to play MacBeth since I first read Shakespeare's tragedy of ambition, witchcraft and madness when I was seventeen. It has been thirty years and now at long last I have been cast as the bewitched Thane of Glamis in a production at my local junior college. This is not my first rodeo, I have performed in many productions of Shakespeare's plays over the last three decades, but this largest and greatest role I have ever played. I am finding the challenges greater than I imagined, and the richness of this play that I thought I knew very well is still revealing itself anew in every rehearsal. It is daunting task but as MacBeth himself remarks “The labor we delight in physics pain.”

   MacBeth has long been rumored to be a cursed play. There are many superstitions and rituals associated with this tradition the most famous being the prohibition of naming the play in a theatre.

   Much of this is good natured tomfoolery, as fearsome as the black cat cutout in a children's Halloween display. We live in an age that not only scoffs at superstition but also seeks to diminishes our strongest emotions. Fear is dis-empowering, fear is negative, fear needs to be reduced to a manageable level. So our contemporary superstitious traditions are made necessarily juvenile so that we can pretend that are fear is but a remnant of a childish nightmare. That said we should remember that rumors of the MacBeth curse are as old as the play itself, and in their earliest manifestation concerned the belief that Shakespeare and his fellows at the Globe had actually brought real Witches to the stage, and that these “weiird Sisters” had performed actual spells before a defenseless audience. The fact that women were barred from performing on any stage in any capacity should inform our understanding of the terror implied by this rumor. The first laws in England and Scotland against witchcraft were passed the year before Shakespeare's birth, so this was a very contemporary dread that Shakespeare played with. To put in terms we might better understand we might have to imagine a play featuring real members of Al Qaeda armed with live explosives. In short I believe that any production of MacBeth worthy of this cursed name should scare the shit out of it's audience.

For the next five weeks I'll be posting on my artful struggle with this role, and I'd love to read your criticism, advice, rants etc. I am keenly interested in the folklore of theatre and I hope whatever readers this blog attracts will contribute your theatre stories and traditions. I also want this blog to be a place where actors and other theatre artists can share our thoughts on the creative process, the joys and trials of making theatre.