Ella R. Dunn / The Mossy Log
This semester, the theatre department has chosen to take on “Macbeth” as its mainstage production. A Shakespearean mammoth of a show, actors have spent the last month and a half averaging 26 hours per week of rehearsal time in preparation for their two-weekend run.
Percival Walter ’25 is portraying the titular lead, and this is his first experience working on a Lewis & Clark mainstage since the fall of his freshman year. This production counts for the “creative” half of his thesis.
“I love to do Shakespeare plays when they are purposeful,” Walter said. “There is a real moral, ethical choice to choose to do a Shakespeare show, and the department decided to do it. I was really excited to audition for it — I am trained in Shakespeare acting.”
Walter expressed some qualms with the way modern society handles Shakespeare’s works.
“There is a real barrier of accessibility to the language of Shakespeare. My belief is that a lot of that has to do with the people in the production, who are making it, and that you can choose to make it accessible,” Walter said.
Ruby Guzman ’25, playing Lady Macbeth, shares Walter’s accessibility concerns but is excited about LC’s version of the show.
“I was really, really nervous about doing ‘Macbeth.’ I was like, ‘Oh, it’s Shakespeare, sometimes it doesn’t feel accessible.’ It’s hard — I was cast, I sat down and read the script, and was like ‘I don’t understand any of this,’” Guzman said. “But, first of all, I think Shakespeare is meant to be watched and not read. I think that people can absolutely understand. I think it’s the way that we’ve set it up that makes it feel inaccessible — it’s like, if you understand it, you’re smart. At the end of the day, I think audiences are smart and they’ll get it.”
Anna Kulbashny, ’25, playing Lady Macduff and Hecate, agrees that the text is a challenging read.
“Shakespeare can seem really daunting to people, and to me as well, sometimes, so getting that in the body early was a big step and it took some time to get there,” Kulbashny said. “We started doing that prep, a bunch of us, early in the year, back in fall.”
Walter reflected on the many problems with performing a play from so far in the past and what difficulties it might present in our modern, more tolerant and accepting world — despite this, there is value to consuming and learning from historic media when that history continually repeats itself.
“The plays are very old and mired in a bunch of bigotry from systems, because they were required to. They specifically are written to uphold a lot of bigoted things like misogyny and racism and ableism,” Walter said. “The trick is, the stories are written very well, in their structure and their plot and their characters and their poetry. What I think they are the most useful for is reflecting back to a society what’s going on (now). In “Macbeth,” for instance, there is a tyrant character, and we are always dealing with tyrants and have always been dealing with tyrants. I feel like it’s important to ask and figure out, ‘How do people get there, to that point?’”
Guzman has chosen to write her senior thesis on the modern relevance of Shakespeare — bringing up the question, should actors put as much of an emphasis on his work as they do?
“Shakespeare is kind of this training ground for actors, but is it fair that we’re using this training ground that doesn’t have any Black characters? Except for Othello, who is a super angry man. And these roles weren’t even meant for women. Half of the women’s roles I’m like, ‘Wait, we got half of her story, I don’t even know what’s going on.’ I have my qualms with Shakespeare, and why we’re choosing to do him when I think other playwrights can capture the same thing as him,” she said.
Guzman chose to audition for “Macbeth” because she was excited to work with Rebecca Lingafelter, the play’s director and the theatre department’s chair. Lingafelter’s unique directing style involves gathering material, body movements and staging to use in the show from acting exercises done during the early rehearsals.
“I had worked with (Rebecca) my sophomore year on Rent. It’s so much rehearsal time, and she asks for so much, and it feels so good. She pushes you, and I think I wanted to be pushed,” Guzman said.
Seb Lockhart ’25, playing Macduff, auditioned because he is interested in how the occult appears in early modern theatre. He explores this further in his thesis.
“(My thesis is) talking about the three shows I’ve been involved in at LC — ‘Hamlet,’ ‘Faustus’ and now ‘Macbeth,’” Lockhart said. “All of those are early-modern performances which incorporate elements of the supernatural or the occult, and I was sort of interested in why this comes up so much in these early-modern plays. ‘Macbeth’ is, like, the poster child for combining those elements because it is a witch play, there’s so much about those ritualistic elements. Mainly, (I auditioned because) I am a bitch for Shakespeare.”
Kulbashny had never performed in an LC mainstage before and was excited about the opportunity.
“I had worked on so many student projects and a lot of different thesis festivals since freshman year, and thought this would be an incredible challenge. I have experience of doing his work since middle school,” Kulbashny said. “This kind of show is just a beast, and it’s so long, so dense, and so well-known and respected. After talking with Rebecca about her early concepts, it just felt so right.”
Many cast members expressed excitement about the cast of the show and how tight-knit everybody was right off the bat.
“ It’s such a good group. Immediately, everyone showed up and was like, ‘I’m excited to do this,’” Guzman said.
If you know anything about theatre mythology, one of the biggest superstitions surrounds this play, and specifically the speaking of the name “Macbeth.” Productions of the show are said to have gone awry, and if a company is working on any other show and one of its members speaks the name, it is said to be unlucky.
“It’s funny because I don’t believe in things like that, but I was walking and a crow came down and grabbed my head and then flew away,” Guzman said. “I was like ‘Oh my god, maybe that bird knew I was doing ‘Macbeth,’ maybe that was a warning. Or a blessing.’”
According to the Royal Shakespeare Company, if you curse a show by saying “Macbeth” in the theatre, to undo it, you must “Exit the theatre, spin around three times, spit, curse and then knock on the theatre door to be allowed back in.”
“Both of my parents work in technical theatre, so I grew up under the direct influence of theater superstition,” Lockhart said. “My mom, specifically, is extremely serious about the ‘Macbeth’ superstition. There was some big show she was working on and she said ‘Macbeth’ in the theatre, and then midway through, truly everything started going completely, absolutely, terribly wrong, and the director of the show came over to her and was like, ‘This is your fault,’ and made her do a bunch of shit to undo it, like running around the theatre. My mom instilled that in me.”
Despite this “curse,” most say it is only applicable if putting on a show other than “Macbeth,” a convenient caveat to the rule, seeing as it is completely impossible to rehearse or perform the show without naming the titular character.
Luckily, the curse does not seem to extend to the audience, so you are safe — probably. That said, do not miss an opportunity to see this Shakespeare classic. Tickets can be purchased online or at the box office, and evening performances will run on March 7-8 and 13-15 at 7:30 pm, in addition to a matinee show on March 9 at 2:00 pm.
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