Director of Marketing and Communications Steve Scarpa sat down with director and adapter Eric Ting to talk about his upcoming production of MACBETH[1969] at Long Wharf.
Associate Artistic Director Eric Ting, director of Macbeth 1969
Q: Could you describe the show’s concept?
A: At its heart MACBETH[1969] is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy, with a specific focus upon the experience of soldiers returning home from war.
The inspiration for the adaptation came from several places; in particular we were drawn to what is presently happening in our community and in our country with soldiers returning home from the long engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan; and how it resonates with some of the themes that we were examining in the play. People often forget that the second scene of Macbeth is actually a description of a horrific battle and the very next scene is two soldiers returning home victorious from that very battle. We are exploring the challenges these two men – Macbeth and Banquo – face as they recover from the war and endeavor to return to the lives they left behind.
So, a couple of key choices were made. We chose to set it in 1969 during the Vietnam War. That was because we felt there was a much closer kinship between the Vietnam War and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (as opposed to say the first or second World Wars) in terms of the national zeitgeist surrounding them. The Vietnam War gives us the historical distance through which we can explore the manner in which Shakespeare’s play speaks to the traumas of conflict.
A second choice was made to set the production in a hospital in middle America, in part because it evoked the symbolic crossroads suggested by the heath in Shakespeare’s play where Macbeth and Banquo first encounter the Wyrd Sisters—as a space where soldiers heal before re-entering the world, as a space between the war and home; but even more so because the hospital was as far removed from the war front as you can possibly get. That was really important to us, creating a space that was removed from war. Of course when you are in war, war is everywhere. But what happens when you are away from war, where does the war go? Do these soldiers leave the war behind them? Or do they, in fact, carry the war within them, wherever they go? If they do that, how does that internal war manifest itself in the external world?
A hospital is a sanctuary, a place of safety, peace, serenity, and healing; a place that is the antithesis of the battlefield. This location allows us to examine the repercussions of war through the individual and not simply in the vast landscape of the battlefield.
Q: Why did you decide to read the text in this manner?
A: Because theatre is such an immediate art form, it’s not uncommon to look for ways that classic texts speak to the contemporary experience, in this case of being a soldier. There is something about Macbeth that really seemed to resonate with the moment.
Banquo and Macbeth suffer from insomnia and bad dreams. They walk around sleepless late at night. There is paranoia and quickness to anger. These can all be considered manifestations of post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by experiences in combat. At the heart of our consideration of this play is the idea that violence begets violence, which begets more violence. What we are looking at is the way war touches all of us, not only those that are engaged in warfare, but all who are connected to those engaged in warfare and those they touch, and even those who think they are free from it. We want to explore this idea that no one is immune—that the real trauma of war is this overwhelming burden of violence in our world.
Q: How else does this idea manifest itself in the work?
Upon returning, Banquo is severely wounded physically. Macbeth, perhaps less pronounced to anybody, is wounded himself, but psychologically. We don’t see the manifestation of that psychological damage till the death of his friend Banquo. Once Banquo dies there are a whole series of events that unravel – Macbeth sees the ghost of Banquo, he sees the witches and in the visit to the witches he’s given visions of the future. All of these supernatural events seem odd enough, but they grow worse and worse as the play progresses, spiraling out of control. I like to think it’s possible that William Shakespeare himself may have been observing the experiences of soldiers returning home from war in Elizabethan times and his observation of those soldiers translated into supernatural events.
Q: What have you learned in examining the issues of post-traumatic stress disorder in terms of this particular play?
We knew going into this that there would be a concern among some people that setting the play in 1969 during the Vietnam War would perpetuate the stereotype of the Vietnam veteran that comes home, unable to deal with his experiences, breaks psychologically and commits acts of violence … The most important thing for us is to humanize these soldiers by looking at the way in which these men upon their return were being asked to forget all of these experiences. They were being asked to suppress these horrific memories of battle and to wake up the following morning in their bed with their spouse, have pancakes and eggs and sit and read the newspaper as if they’d never been in a jungle, as if they’d never walked through a swamp, as if they’d never fired a gun.
Q: Could you talk a little bit about how the choices in the adaptation were made?
A: Most productions of Shakespeare done today go through some kind of editing, some kind of cutting. They cut references that only speak to an Elizabethan audience member or sometimes they are cut for length. While we’ve edited the original text of Macbeth in such a way as to tell a very specific story, audiences will hear Shakespeare’s Macbeth. And if we do our job right, it will be in a way that they’d never thought to hear it, as if they’re hearing it again for the first time.
We were interested in examining our own national experience through a classic text. We believe at Long Wharf Theatre that theatre speaks to the human experience, the human condition. We also believe that the human experience is not tied down to any chronological moment, but is an expansive thing, one that spans the length of human history. What you come to understand is that the experience of these soldiers is not unique to this war, but rather it is the universal experience of all war. The same challenges that those soldiers returning from Vietnam faced on a daily basis were the same challenges that soldiers have been facing since the beginning of war itself, are the same challenges facing our men and women in the armed services today: how does one recover from an experience that so profoundly and irrevocably changes the way the world is seen?