MACBETH, David Geffen School of Drama, 2023

JANUARY 27-28, 2023

DAVID GEFFEN SCHOOL OF DRAMA AT YALE

James Bundy, Elizabeth Parker Ware Dean

Florie Seery, Associate Dean

Chantal Rodriguez, Associate Dean

Carla L. Jackson, Assistant Dean

PRESENTS

Macbeth

by William Shakespeare

directed by Bobbin Ramsey

Creative Team

Scenic Designer

Omid Akbari

Costume Designer

YuJung Shen

Lighting Designer Yung-Hung Sung

Sound Designer

Stan Mathabane

Projection Designer

Hannah Tran

Production Dramaturg

Gabrielle Hoyt

Fight and Intimacy Coordinators

Kelsey Rainwater

Michael Rossmy

Stage Manager

Nakia Shalice Avila

Cast

in alphabetical order

Malcolm, Fleance, Macduff Boy Sam Douglas

Macduff, Sergant, Second Murderer Patrick Falcon

Ross, Third Murderer, Seyton Janiah François

Banquo, Doctor, Siward Anthony Grace

Duncan, First Murderer, Young Siward

Lucas Iverson

Lady Macbeth

Maggie McCaffery

Lennox, Lady Macduff, Gentle Woman

Caro Riverita

Macbeth

Nomè SiDone

Macbeth is performed without an intermission.

Content Advisories

This production contains a depiction of death by suicide, graphic violence, and the death of a child.

This production is supported by The Benjamin Mordecai III Production Fund.

Artistic:

Assistant Costume Designer

Rea J. Brown

Assistant Sound Designer and Engineer

Tojo Rasedoara

Assistant Stage Manager

Aura Michelle

Production:

Associate Safety Advisors

Megan Birdsong, Aholibama Castañeda

González, and Jeremy Landes

Associate Production Manager

Timothy “TJ” Wildow

Technical Supervisor

Jason Dixon

Production Electrician

Jasmine Moore

Projection Engineer

Erik Keating

Projection Programmer

Doaa Ouf

Run Crew

Kyle J. Artone, Xi (Zoey) Lin, Charlie Lovejoy, and Suzu Sakai

Administration

Associate Managing Director

Matthew Sonnenfeld

Assistant Managing Director

Natalie King

Management Assistants

Anne Ciarlone and Maya Louise Shed

House Manager

Spencer Knoll

Production Photographer

T. Charles Erickson

Yale University acknowledges that Indigenous peoples and nations, including Mohegan, Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke, Golden Hill Paugussett, Niantic, and the Quinnipiac and other Algonquian speaking peoples, have stewarded through generations the lands and waterways of what is now the state of Connecticut. We honor and respect the enduring and continuing relationship that exists between these peoples and nations and this land.

The Shakespeare Repertory Projects are designed to be learning experiences that complement classroom work, providing a medium for students at David Geffen School of Drama at Yale to combine their individual talents and energies toward the staging of collaboratively created works. Your attendance meaningfully completes this process.

THE BENJAMIN MORDECAI III PRODUCTION

FUND, established by a graduate of the School, honors the memory of the Tony Award-winning producer who served as Managing Director of Yale Repertory Theatre, 1982–1993, and as Associate Dean and Chair of the Theater Management Program from 1993 until his death in 2005.

All patrons must wear masks at all times while inside the theater except when eating or drinking. Our staff, backstage crew, and artists will also be masked at all times.

The taking of photographs or the use of recording devices of any kind in the theater without the written permission of the management is prohibited.

David Geffen School of Drama productions are supported by the work of more than 200 faculty and staff members throughout the year.

Front image: disconnect by Andreas Lie, used with permission. andreaslie.com | @artworkbylie

Here May You See the Tyrants

The Macbeths, struggling to produce life, instead seize the means of death. And in assassinating King Duncan under their own roof, the couple unearth a fundamental truth about their universe: power lies not in creation, but in destruction. As political theorist Achille Mbembe writes in Necropolitics, “The ultimate expression of sovereignty…resides in the power and capacity to dictate who is able to live and who must die…To be sovereign is to exert one’s control over mortality….”

Although the Macbeths’ rise and fall seems bounded by their murder of the king and their own eventual deaths, the violence that characterizes Shakespeare’s imagined Scotland extends far beyond the play’s titular pair. Macbeth opens on a world at war: the king’s most trusted advisor has turned traitor, backed by an alliance of domestic rebels, foreign invaders, and mercenaries. Amidst this civil strife, Macbeth distinguishes himself through loyalty and heroism, beating back two enemy armies and carving a rebel leader from navel to skull. An instrument of violence, this decorated warrior nevertheless displays profound humanity, longing for his wife, grieving his childlessness, and imagining a better future. In this internal capaciousness, he’s joined by his “dearest partner of greatness,” Lady Macbeth. “Make thick my blood,” she prays when we first meet her, “stop up the access and passage to remorse,” desperate to “unsex” herself rather than endure the loneliness and limitation that she faces as a woman.

But Macbeth offers no hope for a different life, no vision for a better world. Instead, the audience follows the couple on a spiraling descent to hell. Once king, Macbeth ossifies, hardening into a blood-crusted despot.

Meanwhile Lady Macbeth liquefies, her carefully compartmentalized identity dissolving into itself until existence becomes impossible. Having dared to dream, to imagine, the two end their play as a pair of corpses, fodder for a cycle of violence that seeks only to perpetuate itself.

Envisioning the killing of a king, Lady Macbeth fears that heaven itself will “peep through the blanket of the dark/To cry ‘Hold! Hold!’” But at first, no one in Scotland does cry “Hold.” Most of its nobility, as steeped in blood as the man they’ll come to call a tyrant, witness the Macbeths’ rise without taking action. Still, the Macbeths cannot avoid witnessing themselves. Nor can they ever avoid the audience’s witness. Nor, consequently, can we avoid witnessing the Macbeths.

Witnessing holds terrible power: in Macbeth, this ability transcends the human, taking on a supernatural aspect. Rather than localize the three Weird Sisters—Macbeth’s first and continual witnesses—to a trio of performers, our production disembodies them. Doing so blurs the barriers between human and witch, transforming the entire performance space (with all of us inside) into a bubbling cauldron and rendering the play itself as an infernal charm that may be “wound up,” but will never end. Mbembe, after all, did not write Necropolitics about medieval Scotland, but about our world today: one in which we feel ourselves buffeted by forces outside of our control; one in which 24/7 witnessing never stops; one in which human-enacted violence never ceases; one in which the frame of things disjoints, the earth itself revolts, and Birnam Wood seems poised to march on Dunsinane.

—Gabrielle Hoyt, Production Dramaturg