Shakespeare on the Boston Common (Photo: Courtesy of Commonwealth Shakespeare Company)
This summer has the look of life back in 2019. Lots of concerts, outdoor gatherings, busy beaches, people on vacations, overbooked flights. Even so, dogged remnants of where we have been remain, like masked faces that can still be spotted in the crowds. (I am training myself to greet that sight with a generous hearted, “Each person finds seeks their level of comfort” instead of the limbic, “Don’t remind me of that painful time!”)
But looking beyond the window dressing that is touting that Life is Normal Again, most of us know it isn’t. Not really. Something has shifted under us, something quite different from tectonic plates that periodically squirm in their assigned seats. The post pandemic mindset does not have a scientific name that I know of, but many of us now carry a heightened sense of just how fragile everything actually is.
That frangibility does however make the simple pleasures increasingly important, like finally being able to escape the forced doomdom of Zoom (a particularly distasteful aspect of life during the pandemic for some of us.) Just to be with other humans, in real life, feels like an exhale of collective pleasure.
This longing for communal connection has played out hugely in the phenom that has erupted around two blockbuster films of the summer, Oppenheimer and Barbie. The hoopla is more than well written content, expertly crafted performances, cinematic artistry or the sheer pageantry of movie making. People crave a transformative experience, one that can happen in the company of other humans, friends and strangers. Speaking personally, that hunger was so powerful that it forced me to decidedly expand my tolerance boundaries. Usually extremely irritated by long lines, I cheerfully stood in one last week just so I could be part of a sold out film viewing at my local theater.
David Dayen astutely captured this Barbenheimer moment:
The biggest revelation from that big weekend was that it happened outside of people’s homes, in theaters, in nothing less than a cultural event. People are dressing for the occasion, even in places as far away from the American epicenter as Russia. There are pregame parties and postgame discussions. It feels like a common cultural moment.
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This is coming out of an entertainment industry that has spent the last decade trying to individualize the experience of watching films, which has since its inception been a communal event. Following the norms of live theater that predated it, the mode and some of the appeal of the movies has been to watch on a big screen with a bunch of strangers in a darkened room. Home video and cable chipped away at that, the pandemic nearly killed it off, and streaming tried to completely change that context, using the algorithm to personalize entertainment consumption.
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Audiences last week said resoundingly that they didn’t want that. They wanted to experience a common story; they wanted to watch and react and laugh and cry and even argue together. They wanted this even more after years of self-imposed isolation. And they didn’t want the algo telling them what fit their tastes, what they “should” watch. They even took in other films at higher levels over the weekend, suggesting that not just two original openings drove them to the multiplexes, but the experience of moviegoing itself.
Much has been written about both of these films, and I have a lot of thoughts about them too. Perhaps I’ll weigh in on that topic in the future. It is actually another experience of an exhale of collective pleasure that I want to highlight: a performance of Macbeth on the Boston Common.
For a good number of Bostonians, free Shakespeare on the Common is a summer ritual. Like many of my friends, I have made the trek to the Common with my children, blankets and a picnic for years in order to enjoy iambic pentameter, rhymed and unrhymed, lilting into the night air.
This year’s production is directed by Boston’s relentless champion of free Shakespeare, Steven Maler. This Macbeth has been thoughtfully tailored and edited for an outdoor performance where the audience is very diverse, from those who know every line by heart to first time newbies. It is also an audience that is seated on the ground, so lively pacing is important. Commonwealth Shakespeare Company, now in its 26th year, has been one of Boston’s most vital advocates for public access to theater, and they have focused steadily on bringing Shakespeare a little closer to their audiences. This year two supertitle monitors were installed at either end of the proscenium so the actual play text can be read in real time. Another good move for accessibility.
While enjoying the simple pleasure of sharing an outdoor performance with mutually engaged strangers, I considered the trajectory of Macbeth’s current popularity. Its storyline has taken on a very particular kind of relevance at this moment in time, much the way Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet have dominated at other times in our history. (For those who like to track these things, it has definitely been moving up in the Favorite Shakespeare Play rankings.) From the extraordinary success of the Macbeth-inspired immersive theater, Sleep No More (the British PunchDrunk theater production first staged in Boston in 2009 before moving to New York) to new productions on Broadway and a high concept film adaptation by the Coen Brothers (starring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand,) the play has become a particular kind of mirror for our current political and cultural circumstances. Themes in the play are uncannily aligned with headlines everywhere—political power grabs, anarchy, rampant disregard for the rule of law, hubris and narcissistic overreach, conspiratorial thinking, corruption, treachery, intrigue. And as if it were preternaturally customized for our particular moment in time, Shakespeare has spread the evil making in this play from the usual male villians to Lady Macbeth, a woman who is every bit as fierce, fiery and ambitious as her male counterparts.
At the start of the play, the Macbeths are not vile and venal couple. When the action begins, Macbeth is fresh off a successful military coup, heroically devoted to his king and country. But questionably sourced information infects their thinking about themselves and their world, throwing the couple into a vortex of unremitting violence that eventually destroys the entire leadership elite of their nation. Whether the setting is the 11th century or 2023, the play is a chronicle of destructive human behavior that is very familiar.
I loved this production. Macbeth is played with the performative flare we have come to expect from Faran Tahir (who also happens to have been part of the very first CSC production 26 years ago.) His presence is a theatrical force field all its own. Joanne Kelly’s Lady Macbeth has weaponized her glamour and position to secure power, and her ambition is so explosive it needs only the slightest nudge to catapult her into the abyss. Kelly’s portrayal of Lady Macbeth does feel frighteningly familiar in its resemblance to a particular archetype of female power that has become increasingly more common in the 21st century.
Honorable characters do step in at the end of this ancient tale to steady the Scottish ship of state. In our current world, with the heightened state of fragility we are facing, it may be that the Macduff we need is actually all of us.
Macbeth runs through August 6.
Joanne Kelly as Lady Macbeth Photo Credit: Nile Scott Studios