Tufts Blogs

I've blogged in the past about Lord Barnum's Players, the group I perform and teach Shakespeare with (and look, we have a Facebook now!). Since last semester, we have three new beautiful performers, which brings our numbers up to five Seniors, two Juniors, two Sophomores, and four freshmen. It's been amazing seeing all my friends - new and old - from different classes come together in this group like a new little family as we juggle a really heavy rehearsal schedule. Part of the reason why that schedule has been so heavy is because we're working on a new adaptation - Macbeth.

Macbeth has kind of taken over my life. I'm playing Lady Macbeth this spring for my Drama Capstone (April 24th at 6:00 and 9:00pm in the Balch Arena Theatre FREE!), also serving as the Dramaturg for that production, and I'm writing a lengthy chapter on Lady Macbeth for my thesis on representations of mental illness in Shakespearean women. But by the far the biggest Macbeth-related challenge I've had this semester is thinking about what Lord Barnum's Players lovingly calls Macbeth for Kidz or Which Witch is Which?.

Up until now, LBP has had two adaptations, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet. Romeo and Juliet is of course one of Shakespeare's tragedies, but the familiarity of the story combined with the almost absurd nature of the plot (marrying someone after three days, faking your own death, Tybalt/Mercutio being crazy) means that we were able to incorporate a lot of comedy into our adaptation. The dramatic parts stay generously serious in tone: We make it clear that Romeo and Juliet are truly in love, we have real stage combat for the fight scenes, and we obviously don't make light of the double-suicide at the end.

With Macbeth, we are really faced with the challenge of starting with a script that is very dark and extremely violent. The one comic scene in Macbeth with the Porter is completely inappropriate for kids, and adding too much comedy into the script seems forced. When I think of Macduff finding out that his wife and kids have been stabbed to death, I really can't justify throwing in a scene where the witches do goofy magic tricks.

We talked about tone a lot as a group. LBP thinks that it's important to have a play like Macbeth in our repertoire, so that we can offer not just romance and comedy to the kids, but tragedy as well. We did find in some ways to throw in jokes here and there to keep the kids engaged; for example, the two murderers who kill Banquo only speak in unison and are generally as incompetent of criminals as the Home Alone robbers. Fleance, Banquo's son, is played as a whiney tween who is totally bored by his dad's antics. But the heart of the play stays spooky and real - Lady Macbeth still goes mad at the end, and Macbeth has to face the final battle without her.

We still joke about doing Macbeth for kids, how it's kind of an absurd concept and how doing something like Midsummer is a million times easier. But we've decided as a group that the kids we perform for, whether they know Shakespeare or not, don't need stupid jokes or silly physical bits to keep them entertained. Of course, we love doing those things, and goofiness will always be part of our M.O. as a children's theatre group. But as a Shakespeare theatre group, I've come to understand that these stories can reach all ages, regardless of content and setting. Suddenly, something about a Scottish king or a teenage girl from Verona can speak to these kids - to their worries about the future, their relationships with friends and family, the things that hurt them and the things that lift them up. Shakespeare has his problems, of course (there's a reason why we won't be adapting Taming of the Shrew), but these plays, with their beautiful poetry and captivating messages, can speak to us as Tufts University students and to a bunch of fifth graders in Lawrence, Massachusetts. And despite its challenges, that's what makes a crazy task like adapting Macbeth for children totally worth it.