Listen to the Rain

This was going to be a surprise. I'd been saving it for months. But, well. 奇貨居くべし.

I've been on the Penn Alumni mailing list for literally years at this point but there's never been an event that I was particularly interested in. It's mostly mixers or networking, which I don't care about at all, or events for families with young children, which I don't have and thus also have no interest in. Sometimes there are lectures, but most of them are in subjects which I either have no interest or not enough background to derive any useful knowledge from--the most recent lecture is about real estate, in which I have neither interest nor knowledge. But when I heard that there would be a Penn Alumni trip to see Macbeth, with lunch at Riva and a lecture by a visiting professor, all for the price of a normal ticket to a Shakespeare Theatre show...well, that justifies all those mails I skimmed and sent to the trash. So Saturday morning, I got dressed up and hopped on the L for the trip to Navy Pier.


The lecture was before lunch, so after meeting and making small talk (‼️) with the people at my table, we settled in to hear Professor Zachary Lesser’s lecture. It was mostly on special effects, starting with the very first line of the play:

Thunder and lightning. Enter three witches.

Apparently the Globe Theatre had a machine in the area above the stage where cannonballs were rolled around on a metal frame to produce thunder, and there were wires on the sides of the stage where lit firecrackers would be sent down to act as lightning. There’s even a contemporary account from the diary of one Simon Forman, an astrologer, counselor, and lecherous asshole, when he went to see a performance of Macbeth. He wrote about two lines he liked, when the witches say to Banquo, "Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none," and a similar but reversed line to Macbeth that doesn’t exist in surviving copies of the script, and everything else he wrote was about the special effects.

Special effects may even have cost us a few more Shakespeare plays. It was the cannons during a performance of Henry VIII that led to the Globe Theatre burning down (again), and rather than pay the £50 assessed from members of the company to build a new one, Shakespeare sold his shares and retired, dying only a few years later.

The other main point of the lecture was about the political context. Professor Lesser mentioned a pamphlet written by King James I called The True Law of Free Monarchies that put forth the position that only G-d could judge a king and that even tyrants must be obeyed if they were legitimate. Macbeth seems like it pretty squarely supports this viewpoint, with even nature revolting against Macbeth’s rule in the form of an eclipse, ghostly visions, and cannibal horses. Shakespeare also conveniently elides Queen Mary when talking about the line of kings descended from Banquo, since she was Catholic and this was politically undesirable.

Alright, on with the show. Spoilers for the staging between the picture and the line of emoji.


It was great! I’ve never seen a bad show at the Shakespeare Theatre, but I've certainly seen ones about which there's no other comments to be made, like, it was good, we had a nice time, let's go home. Not here.

"Macbeth is a dark show. To enhance that darkness, please make sure your phones are as dark and silent as the grave."

"Oh yes. Then, there’ll be no way to call for help."
-Teller

This was the second show that was partially directed by Teller, after The Tempest, and the universal reaction by the audience was that there wasn't much magic here. The other alumni mentioned it a few times, and I heard it from the crowd as I left. And it's true, but compared to The Tempest, Macbeth doesn't have nearly as much place for it. A lot of the supernatural events that don't involve the witches take place off stage, like the cannibal horses, and the eclipse is easy enough to do with lighting.

But the witches! Their costuming was fantastic--they were dressed in white cerements, with large, hooded grey cloaks, and white paint on their skin except for black around their eyes. Most of their lines were cut so that they spent a lot of the play looking down on the action from above or silently lurking in the background when anything significant happened, but they did have magic. In the first scene where Macbeth and Banquo meet them, when the witches leave, they walk off in separate directions. The two grab ahold of the last witch...but her cloak is empty the moment they lay hands on her. When they spoke, they used a sing-song chanting cadence and kept finishing each other's sentences in a way that reminded me of the Thryy Wyrd Tyyns from Night in the Woods. They were up on the second floor of the stage, and when Macbeth was informed that he was now Thane of Cawdor as prophesied, a cymbal clashed and they began wordlessly singing, much like this (if it had no words, anyway).

They'd also show up sometimes and chant "Sleep" "No" "More" sequentially and in harmony at Macbeth as his deeds weighed on him more and more heavily.

The sound design in general was exquisite. There was a man up on the upper level with a drum set and several other instruments who provided plenty of ominous drumming, clanging bells, sudden tones, and other moody noises.

And the final duel with Macduff! Once Macbeth hears that Macduff is not of woman born (so to speak--something else Professor Lesser said is that the witches' prophecies come true through cheap wordplay, but Macbeth still interprets them in the way that's most advantageous to himself and that's what leads to his downfall), he starts laughing and tries to run to a door only to have it open and a witch steps out followed by Banquo's ghost. A second door has another witch and the ghosts of Macduff's wife and children, and the third door has the third witch and King Duncan. Then Lady Macbeth's ghost appears on the balcony, and Macbeth throws down his sword and runs at Macduff.

In the final scene, the three witches are crouched around the throne of Scotland holding the bag that contains Macbeth's head. They pull back the wrapping, exposing the head--and it opens its eyes, blinks, and gasps. Curtain.

It was a great show.


The other interesting event from my point of view is that as I left, I walked out with Professor Lesser since he sat right behind me. We talked about the lack of magic compared to The Tempest and a bit about competent staging that doesn't leave much room for discussion. He asked what year I graduated and then asked if I felt out of place due to age--I was the youngest person at the lunch and lecture by like 20 years--and perked up a bit when I said that I majored in English. He then asked if I was registered on Penn's English Major alumni directory, and when I said I didn't think so, he suggested I do so if I wanted to help Penn English Majors. The English Department has a mentor program where people who are graduating with an English degree and thinking "Oh shit, what do I do?" can talk to alumni about their lives, and he thought my path of graduation to newspaper work to teaching English to being interested in Japanese and translation would provide a good example of a non-standard career path for an English major.

And you know, I might take him up on it.