Which may not be how Shakespeare intended it (or perhaps it was), but thanks to Bob Devin Jones, that's how you're getting it. Jones is directing a version of Macbeth inspired by one staged during the Great Depression: the all-black Voodoo Macbeth. The director of that version, though, was a white man: Orson Welles.
In 1936, Welles agreed to work with the Negro Theater Project, part of the arts arm of the Works Progress Administration called Federal One (the same Federal One that launched Anton Coppola's career). He was 20 and not a recipient of WPA assistance; however, the Project lured Welles into directing Macbeth, aka The Scottish Play (many actors refer to the play as such while in a theater, a long-held superstition). But instead of setting it in Scotland, he would set it in Haiti, and substitute voodoo for witchcraft.
Why do Voodoo Macbeth? we asked Bob Devin Jones, who's directing the production for The Studio@620, of which he's co-founder and artistic director.
"Why shouldn't we?" he answered.
First things first: He's not using Welles’s version.
"We made our own adaptations," Jones says. "He put some scenes in different places; we didn't do that.” Jones did make edits to Shakespeare, though, so that the production would fit better into The Studio's intimate space (the Voodoo Macbeth version having been written for the larger proscenium stages used in the 1930s).
"It's an all African-American cast, that's one thing. Two, you see an incantation, we do that, and we have a couple of pantomime pieces where you show more of the culture," he says. More appropriate would be to say cultures.
“It's very African, Haitian, Creole, Jamaican-centric. We have a couple of Haitian people in the cast, one from Africa. And because it's me directing. It's the whole diaspora of the African experience in the Western Hemisphere,” Jones says.
The words, as he points out, cost nothing, so he's focused his resources on costumes, choreography and music. And casting: His talent-filled ensemble includes a slew of powerhouse professionals, including Erica Sutherlin as Lady Macbeth, Calvin M. Thompson (so effective in the American Stage production of Joe Turner's Come and Gone) as Macbeth, and Sharon Scott as Hecate.
At a dress rehearsal, it all works. The choreography of this Haitian play — the drums, the dancing, the screeching — puts you in the middle of a sexually charged wedding celebration in the islands, all set against the backdrop of Ya La’Ford's blood forest.
While staged as part of Federal One's Negro Theater Project in 1936, which drew criticism as "an experiment in Afro-American showmanship" (which audiences promptly ignored and packed houses to see), the focus of Jones’s production isn't a racial statement.
"No one would question a Scottish Macbeth with an all-white cast," he says.
Rather, it's celebrating Shakespeare's humanity.
“It's all there on the page,” he said at a blocking rehearsal. Shakespeare, he said at Tuesday night dress, creates fully rounded humans.
“It's a great thing to do when you want to do a great thing,” he says. “I’ve told the actors, if you have it, Shakespeare will request it. And if you really have it, it will demand you. It changes the DNA.”
Contact Cathy Salustri at cathy.salustri@cltampa.com.
This article appears in Mar 30 – Apr 6, 2017.