Macbeth

Macbeth.

In Oct 1991, after the two relatively smaller shows we had done in our opening season. I next blew everyone’s mind when I said that I wanted to take on ‘Macbeth’. After I had scraped their brains off the ceiling...they let me! So, I went about gathering all the actors and resources we would need to do so. Now, as an independent theatre company, we had no building of our own to put plays on. So, with each production I had to find somewhere new and suitable to put on the show. This resulted in a worrying but amusing moment in our Attic History. There was a beautiful old building in town which was the 1st Presbyterian church run by Rev. Bruce Rentz and it was in dire need of funds. So, I approached them to use this wonderful old building for the performance and we would donate the proceeds to them. They agreed. They knew the play we were doing and had been given a copy of the script. Now, after we had been rehearsing for many weeks in the space. I got the word back that the poster I had designed was deemed ‘Demonic and disturbed’ by a member of the Church committee. At first I laughed...then came another comment about some of the words being used? I was baffled? This was bloody Shakespeare!!! It turned out to be the scene where the witches are cooking up in their cauldron a magical brew of a newt’s eye, frog’s toe, etc. During this satanic cooking, one of the witches mentions the ‘liver of a blaspheming Jew’. You guessed it! They wondered whether we could cut that bit? So, after talking with Tom Jones, we less than politely refused and decided to take the show elsewhere. My friend Chris Potter suggested her school, and we moved the entire production to ‘Clarkstown North’ High. By pure chance, they had just done the play ‘The Princess and the Pea’. So, lo-and-behold there was a castle already built. We saw this as a good sign and with the help of English teacher Mary Keoughan we were allowed to use the place and raise money for the kids drama dept. Mary was a wonderful influence on the production, sharing her passion and knowledge of the Bard with us. I did indeed design another poster (the first now seemed soiled) and we used it instead to point out the ludicrous criticism it had received. A delicious irony that came out from this was that the someone who’d been helping to stoke the fires behind our back. Turned out to be the infamous ‘Bruce the naked jogger’. The very same Reverend from the 1st Presbyterian church. A member of the cloth or in this case, much less cloth than he should have been wearing while exercising.