Broad Street Review: When Quintessence Theatre Group artistic director Alex Burns announced that the company’s spring 2024 production of Macbeth would “return to its classic roots and the presentation of all-male Shakespeare,” and called the play one of Shakespeare’s “most ferocious and testosterone-driven tragedies,” the Philly theater community took notice.
5 comments:
I agree with this article wholeheartedly. I am all for producing plays that have long existed in the public consciousness with a twist, especially if that twist is one that makes us think more critically about gender and sexuality binaries and pushes the work into the future––but it doesn’t seem like the play being referenced is doing that at all. It’s just placing a bunch of men onstage and attributing the choice to original practices. But the piece isn’t emulating the style of original practice Shakespeare in any other meaningful way, not to mention, if you’re going to explore this concept and talk about drag as an influence, why not bring in actual drag artists and genderqueer individuals who will be able to bring a deeper nuance to the story, and who are so often already overlooked? Not to mention calling Macbeth Shakespeare’s most “testosterone-driven tragedy” is wild considering the driving force behind the violence and hunger for power in the play is Lady Macbeth.
I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of this article by the headline alone, but after reading it I completely agree. While I think for modern audiences the inverting of “traditional” gendered roles played by their respective actors (though it’s not really traditional considering only men played the roles in the original time period) I think that would create an interesting lens to view the production from. While I don’t necessarily disagree with that Macbeth is a very male-driven piece and how the main women practically begs for her to have the strength of a man and take away things that make her a woman so that she can continue proves the point, it is weird to market the show as "Shakespeare’s “most ferocious and testosterone-driven tragedies,”. It feels weirdly sexist, in a way that may not have been intended, but they had something to work with that could’ve been interesting but now it just feels weird.
The author of this article made some really good points and brought my attention to issues that I should definitely consider more often. The marketing, production, and idea of this production of Macbeth are all generally quite problematic, and I feel like advertising any show as "testosterone-driven tragedy" is a very weird and not great thing to do. I really don't like the idea of this show as a whole and I agree with the article's author that the show went back to how it would be made in Shakespeare's time, but didn't really take that into consideration with anything else in the show. It is also very disrespectful for the show's creators to not look for the assistance of the local trans and drag community, especially because it is so prevalent. I think the attitudes toward transgender people in this industry are often still very problematic and a lot of work still needs to be done moving forward.
This this kind of disgusting I read the theaters tagline for the show and my first response was just “Ew” to intentionally call your show a testosterone driven tragedy and mean it in a positive way couldn't be more idiotic. I also really appreciated the line in the article of “perhaps if I send my blood work over with my resume I can expect an audition” because that's exactly what it is it's equating a hormone just someone's ability to represent “true Shakespeare”. Shakespeare had a lot of good things about it sure but just because as Shakespeare has lasted doesn't mean we should go back to how it was originally performed. The only thing keeping Shakespeare afloat is adaptations that take it in new directions, this in fact is not a new direction and is in fact a very very old direction. Shakespeare also had live deaths on stage do you wanna recreate those too to make sure your play is as “accurate as possible”. Get over yourself
This article does a great job of pointing out a problem that the entertainment industry really needs to address. What Alex Burns, and I’m sure other countless other directors, are doing is ridiculous and absolutely unequitable, to say the least. In the article, Baldini excels at pointing out the flaws, some obvious and some not as much, in Burns’ statement and practices. Baldini is absolutely correct in saying that Burns only sees only sees “the people who look and think like him”. The ethics of his casting process are questionable at best, and in any case I think most people would agree that including a trans person (or other diversity of any sort) would allow for interesting themes for the play to explore. It doesn’t really make sense for Burns to cast in such a way simply because it’s traditional Shakespeare – it just means that the production will be nothing new, since it’s no different from previous productions. Nothing new is being produced, and nothing good is coming of this.
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