Shakespearemachine
Parkview Physicians Group Artslab
November 2018
“It’s a hard world for little things...”
-Rachel Cooper, Night of the Hunter
Inspired by the birth of my children, this production of Macbeth was an attempt at an excavation of certain subterranean themes in Shakespeare’s work, namely the fate of the Macbeth’s unseen child. It was also an exploration of the ways young innocents in the play come to various types of harm, this being a preoccupation of mine as a new father.
The world of the tragedy was reimagined as a stark, sculptural world where innocence meets brutality. A landscape stripped to its essentials: cold light, open space, and bodies caked in mud. Macbeth dons modern armor and a paper crown, a symbol of the precarity of his reign. The Weird Sisters, bearing strong resemblances to baby dolls pulled from the muck and the Grady Twins from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, weave lines of fate in red threed pulled from the entrails of dead soldiers. Past and present blurred as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, both haunted by the loss of their child and by the phantoms of their victims, unraveled in a duet of ambition and fear.
Poster art courtesy of Nick Ferran.
Shakespearemachine
Parkview Physician’s Group ArtsLab
Jan 2018
Inspired by the work of Jan Svankmajer, this adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus was set entirely in the confines of Faustus’ study. This was to emphasize the illusionary nature of Faustus’ bargain. He believes that he has gained the secrets of the universe and all the earthly pleasures, whereas, in fact, this is all a dumbshow performed for him by a troupe of grotesquely blank-faced demons.
Accompanied by a chugging doom metal score, performed live by local guitarist Alex Volz, Faustus presented a surreal, hermetic dreamscape where alchemy, puppetry, and masks would collide. Set inside a chalk-covered chamber of symbols, Faustus’s pact is not a grand spectacle but a fevered descent into a cosmos arrayed against him. Darkly playful, Faustus transformed Marlowe’s tragedy into a tactile, unsettling fable about desire, overreach, and the monstrous worlds we conjure for ourselves.
Poster art courtesy of Adam Johnson.
Shakespearemachine
Parkview Physicians Group ArtsLab
October 2016
Rome, just after the fall of the Tarquin kings. A new republic. Not a city of marble, but of dirt.
Bread riots and civil war. This is a Rome just on the edge of barbarism, teetering on the brink of collapse.
The production thrust Shakespeare’s political tragedy into the heart of an uprising. Citizens and soldiers clash in a volatile fight for power, exposing the brutal cost of pride, loyalty, and rebellion. Staged in a traverse configuration to allow for maximum confrontation between opposing parties: first, the patricians and the plebeians of Rome, then the Romans and the Volscians, and finally Aufidius and Coriolanus himself.
Coriolanus was the second production of Shakespearemachine, staged the same year as The Comedy of Errors and featured masks designed by members of the Shakespearemachine resident company.
Poster art courtesy of Ryan Pickard.
Shakespearemachine
Parkview Physicians Group ArtsLab
May 2016
The Comedy of Errors was the first production mounted by Shakespearemachine.
Conceived as a Kafkaesque slapstick farce, the action took place in an arena meant to evoke the main ring of a circus. Traditional commedia dell’arte masks were used in this production to emphasize the link between that tradition and the stock types of Shakespeare’s earliest comedy.
This production of The Comedy of Errors emphasized the carnivalesque dimension. It was a world of exaggerated characters, toy-like props, and vaudevillian movement. Performers leapt, tumbled, and collided through a story where logic dissolves and play rules the stage. A riot of physical comedy, this Comedy of Errors transformed confusion into pure theatrical delight.
Poster art courtesy of Ryan Pickard.
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