Macbeth in Space: A Striking and Unpredictable Reimagining of Shakespeare’s Classic Tragedy

By NICOLE STACHOWIAK | Arts Reporter

It all begins with the name, both attention-grabbing and self-explanatory: Macbeth in Space. From February 16–18, the Dean’s Men, UChicago’s student Shakespeare troupe, reimagined Macbeth, setting Shakespeare’s classic tragedy far from Earth. In this production, the team has denaturalized the well-known text, conflicting with audience expectations about Macbeth. The production incorporates elements of the digital and the transhuman into the storytelling to explore Shakespeare’s classic tale of murder, guilt, and grief.

The production eagerly integrates its creative locale into dialogue (for example, each instance of the word “castle” is replaced by “planet”), yet also embraces the inherent tension between the original text and its new, futuristic setting. Evoking both the past and future at once, Macbeth in Space effectively situates itself in a liminal, disorienting place. The bell referenced by the characters sounds more like a phaser, and the angular designs on the fabric that each character wears evoke computer chips; various exposed computer parts can be seen attached to panels behind the actors. The backgrounds (such as alien mountain regions and caves) were projected onto a screen behind the actors, the same method ultimately used to portray Macbeth’s prophetic visions from the witches. These changes provoke a sense of tension, alienating viewers from the environment and text they expected. Ultimately, according to the codirector, third-year Steele Citrone, it is this feeling of tension that is at the heart of Macbeth’s success: “The greatness behind the play…is that Macbeth’s descent into wickedness is gradual; it is fueled by a constant ambition to raise himself above his status, and he must contemplate his morals while doing so.”

There is an inherent goofiness in setting Macbeth in Space, of course, and that was in part what made this production so compelling. Much of the set design leaned into a campy, colorful, and low-tech vision of science fiction, evoking classic Star Trek more than Dune with colorful makeup and scenery that glowed under blacklight. One might expect the two disparate tones to clash, but in this production, they created a compelling push-and-pull between the oppressively dark source material and the occasionally comedic original elements, helping to highlight important elements of the original work. Citrone’s favorite scene in the play comes in Act II, Scene 3, where, just after Macbeth’s fateful murder of King Duncan, a porter engages in a comedic exchange involving bawdy jokes and wordplay with Macduff. “The genius of this scene,” Citrone said, “is that it acts as the perfect catharsis for the audience to purge their feelings of Macbeth’s dramatic murder.” By placing the only comedic scene of the play right after its most tense moment, Citrone believes that the rest of the play can continue to build tension. In much the same way, the unique setting serves as both intensifier and comedic catharsis when necessary—the audience responded to alterations equally with laughs and gasps, such as when the witches changed into shiny, Daft Punk–esque masks, or when Macbeth partook in the hookah that replaced the witches’ cauldron.

These changes created subtle shifts in the narrative as well, such as the replacement of letters read aloud with recorded transmissions played over speaker. With such a well-known text, this creative reinterpretation calls into question everything the audience knows and assumes about Macbeth, forcing them to encounter the text as though it were the first time. Citrone explained that these creative choices were made to emphasize the story’s themes about the innate nature of humanity: “ Setting Macbeth in the future instead of its usual 1000s setting demonstrates the longevity the play has to be a human story in any setting or condition. The world may change, but human nature never [does].”

Perhaps the production’s most striking creative decisions were the radical alterations made to Macbeth’s Act V warhand Seyton (a minor character). Citrone and co-directors Caroline Kaminsky and Nora Schultz replaced Seyton entirely with a reanimated Banquo—Citrone lists their inspirations as Frankenstein’s monster and the Terminator. “This decision was very intentional and even can be supported by the text,” Citrone explained. “First, in Act IV, Scene I, the witches bring back Banquo and his ancestors to show Macbeth; thus, we were able to have Macbeth retrieve his body there. Then, in Act V, Scene III, the doctor talks about a strange phenomenon of Mac- beth being able to heal people and speed their recoveries. This spurred our decision to have Macbeth be a mechanic and mad scientist in this version to reanimate Banquo.”

The scenes with Banquo’s reanimated corpse were some of the production’s most striking, combining grotesque makeup with cyborg-esque costuming such as heavy goggles. The interpretation of Banquo emphasized the distorted and twisted tone this production favored as a whole (for instance, an intestine prop torn out and flung aside during Banquo’s murder or Macbeth’s head hoisted at the end of the play), but in a newly science-fictional way. The horror of witnessing a zombified Banquo comes equally from the classic fear of reanimation that Shakespeare invokes with ghosts and hallucinations, but also now with the new threat of technology facilitating a move away from humanity. This is a dynamic rooted in the original text—Citrone notes that the play “blends the fantastical with the human condition: both Macbeth himself and the Witches serve as antagonistic forces.” Technology then becomes a sort of magic or curse in this production by replacing the supernatural in newly horrific ways. At the end of the day, no matter the source of the fantastical (whether magic or technology), Macbeth is a tale of human folly. It is only fitting that in this production, Macbeth was the creator of his mechanical monster.

Macbeth in Space is a rich reimagining of Shakespeare’s classic tragedy, rife with insightful commentary and fascinating implications about the roles of technology and human nature in ambition, guilt, and death.