Courtesy of Equally Represented Arts
Lady Macbeth (Rachel Tibbets) and Macbeth (Mitch Eagles).
Ambition. Madness. The arcane rules of…dinner parties and child-rearing?
Theater company Equally Represented Arts takes on Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth, weaving in text from Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Emily Post’s Etiquette, Revelations, and advertisements from the 1950s.
The resulting Trash Macbeth, running through Saturday, is a dreamlike impression of the doomed Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s brief and violent ascent and descent. The set and props are made from trash and found objects, lending a grungy glamor to the proceedings while infusing them with commentary on waste and consumerism.
If you’re lucky, you’ll literally get a seat at the Macbeths’ dinner party table in this immersive piece of experimental theater. And don’t flub your lines—the audience stars as King Duncan.
The work had its genesis at Saint Louis University, which about a year ago hired ERA artistic director Lucy Cashion to create a piece of devised theater—one where the script is created and evolves in rehearsals, rather than one that has the script as a starting point—that made use of re-purposed materials.
Cashion, since hired full-time at SLU as assistant professor of fine and performing arts, said in considering the parameters and talking with others, she immediately began thinking of waste. Shakespeare’s famous witches and their cauldron on the heath full of tongue of dog and eye of newt quickly occurred to her.
“The idea of trash also intersected with the themes of Macbeth that have to do with covering ugliness,” Cashion says. The witches stand in for the allegory of the Fates, spinning and cutting the thread of life, as well as cooking up prophecies. Add in Lady Macbeth’s famous obsession with cleanliness, says Cashion, and “you have this triumvirate of cliché ‘woman’ activities, and you have that combined with the need for appearances that mask who you are and what you’ve done.”
This led her to consider the optimistic, consumerist setting of postwar America and 1950s social norms—cue Dr. Spock and Emily Post, bastions of control, appearance and social perfection. Dinner parties, which Emily Post had plenty of thoughts on, serve as pivotal moments in Macbeth and literally provide the stage in Trash Macbeth.
After mounting the work at SLU, Cashion knew the concept had legs, so she brought it to ERA, where it continued to evolve.
“It did not feel like directing at all,” she says. “Our rehearsals were spent creating content.” She brought structure, goals and ingredients to scenes. The actors, musicians and designers collaborated on accomplishing the goals with the texts at hand.
“The best way to experience it is just to sit back and let it happen,” says Mitch Eagles, who performs as Macbeth and Murderer 3. “Even if it doesn’t feel like it’s making sense, it’s kind of like a dream.”
Eagles says that Macbeth in Trash Macbeth gets to let a little more of the comedy in his bedeviled character come through. “It’s a House of Cards, plotting role,” Eagles says. “He’s a fascinatingly funny character, which has been really fun for me.”
The theater itself and the sets play a starring role in the production as well. Artist Kristin Cassidy, known for her work with objects found in and along the Mississippi River, created Trash Macbeth’s world using literal garbage and found objects that had been in her studio awaiting their moment of glory. Regal capes of trash, place settings rescued from an abandoned building and old National Geographic magazines create a woozily beautiful world.
“One of my favorite pieces in the project is the chandelier,” Cassidy says. “I took plastic bottles and cut out the bottoms. These found plastic objects reflect light and create this beautiful object from found trash.”
Keep an eye out for the blood in the murderous production—shredded magazines in period-appropriate colors communicate the characters’ misdeeds. And a literal web of destruction and deceit casts gorgeous shadows.
“All of these things come together to communicate the story of Macbeth,” Cassidy says, “but with the idea of losing control in the same way that consumerism has, and the way that plastic trash is something we’ve lost control over.”
Trash Macbeth finishes its run this weekend, May 4 through 7. General admission tickets are $20; more info at eratheatre.org.
