Taking Shakespeare in Stride: Lady Macbeth at the American Repertory Theatre

Macbeth in Stride, a live 'concert play', created an assemblage of original dialogue, R&B, gospel, and rock music, and 'Shakespeare fragments' to put Lady Macbeth into action as a figure of Black feminine desire and ambition. Yet, rather than read Lady Macbeth as a 'universal' figure-the problematic of which scholars of performance, casting, and adaptation have theorized-this production used three distinct, overlapping characters to suggest Lady Macbeth's resonance with gendered and racialized experience as well as the Shakespearean text's entanglement with structures of oppression circumscribing those experiences. Creator Whitney White performed 'Woman', Lady Macbeth, and (I argue) an implied character bridging the gap between them: Lady M. Lady M.'s musical numbers provided a shared subjectivity for both Woman and Lady Macbeth, embodying a dialectic between performing Shakespeare and performing Blackness. So, too, Macbeth in Stride suggested a pedagogical paradigm for taking Shakespeare in stride. Staging acts of reading in and for Black communities, the show invited audiences to locate themselves in the text while acknowledging the ways in which the text failed to accommodate them. To take Shakespeare in stride is to see and shift the forces that frustrate both reparative reading and gender and racial equality.

Automated summary

"Macbeth in Stride" is a live 'concert play' that combines original dialogue, R&B, gospel, and rock music, and 'Shakespeare fragments' to portray Lady Macbeth as a symbol of Black feminine desire and ambition. Instead of depicting Lady Macbeth as a 'universal' figure, this production uses three overlapping characters to highlight her resonance with gendered and racialized experiences. Through its musical numbers and performances, the play explores the dialectic between performing Shakespeare and performing Blackness, and encourages audiences to confront the forces that frustrate reparative reading and gender and racial equality.