To murder, or not to murder? In Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” that is the question.
The answer is obvious, especially to Lady Macbeth, who’s always clad in flowing red: By all means, murder. And then, murder some more. Stop worrying, dismiss your conscience, there’s work to be done.
While you’re at it, student director Sam Sparkman urged his Skyview High School cast during a recent dress rehearsal, make it look terrifying — and tiring to the bone. Don’t just point your sword at your opponent, he said; lunge like it means your life.
“You’re not just swinging your sword, you are murdering this person,” he said. “Stay in the fight.”
His actors ran their carefully choreographed fight scene again, this time with serious screams and big, muscular movements; then the exhausted victors exhausted themselves even more by struggling to pull their swords back through and out of the fallen bodies of their foes.
IF YOU GO
What: “Macbeth,” by William Shakespeare, directed by Sam Sparkman.
When: 7 p.m. May 16-18; 2 p.m. May 18.
Where: Skyview High School, 1300 N.W. 139th St., Vancouver.
Tickets: $5; $4 for students with ASB.
Did you know?
The spookiest superstition in all theater history must be the “Scottish curse,” which holds that one must never, ever speak the word “Macbeth” inside a theater — or disaster will surely strike.
It’s a pretty tall order for a play titled and starring a character by that very name, so some believe the curse includes a reasonable escape clause: the word is OK when part of rehearsal or performance. But if you’re a Scottish curse purist, this tragedy is always called “The Scottish Play,” and its main characters are strictly “Scottish King” and “Scottish Lady.”
Many legends inform the curse. Maybe those three witches cast a real spell, not a make-believe one; maybe Shakespeare stole their lines from a real coven of witches, earning eternal wrath. Or maybe, thanks to many combat scenes, “Macbeth” just happens to be an accident-prone play.
— Scott Hewitt
The quickening physical gruesomeness of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” reflects our antihero’s growing moral gruesomeness; while motivated by a magical prediction that he will become king of Scotland, Macbeth’s first murder on his way throneward is ambivalent and amateurish.
The real power behind his climb, Lady Macbeth, accuses him of cowardice — or, as she puts it in one of those unforgettable Shakespearean phrases, being “too full o’ the milk of human kindness.”
“I love the language, the clever wordplay,” said Sparkman, a graduating senior at Skyview High School who has moved up through acting to directing because, he said, he also loves managing big projects that are made of lots of little details — everything from the energy of the violence to the meanings behind all those fancy phrases, both famous and obscure.
This production of “Macbeth” is an entirely student-driven one, staged by the Skyview High School Drama Club. It’s the first Shakespeare Skyview has attempted in nearly a decade, according to faculty adviser Kerry Jeffrey — who mostly hung back and helped out during Monday’s rehearsal, letting Sparkman take the lead.
When rehearsals began, weeks ago, Sparkman and the cast read through each scene and got very clear about what’s happening; even if they can’t catch every single Shakespearean word, he said, the audience should be able to grasp every character — if the actors are really doing their jobs.
“I like being in broad control of the whole story,” Sparkman said. “It is such a great, sweeping story. It’s just a really good show.”
So good that Jaleel Amusa, a junior who loves literature and Shakespeare, finds himself transported by the leading role.
“I love this character so much,” Amusa said. “He’s humble at first, but by the end he is pure evil.” Amusa said he hasn’t done a lot of acting before, but his commanding presence and passionate performance during the dress rehearsal was convincing.
“I love playing the bad guy,” Amusa said. “Without the bad guy, you can’t have a play. The evildoer drives everything.”
As he does that, and the body count in Skyview’s “Macbeth” starts to rise, you can’t miss the red stuff that starts dripping down the sides of the proscenium and eventually starts pooling below. That projection and others — such as stone castle walls — are controlled in the sophisticated tech booth at the back of Skyview’s big concert hall.
“It’s really great to be able to learn all this,” said crew head Melody Darling, a junior who said she’s not just pressing buttons and sliding sliders — she’s been up the catwalk, high above the auditorium, setting up the hardware, too.
“Every moment outside of school has been this” for the past 10 weeks, said Jeffrey. “We are very proud and very excited to be sharing this.”
