We are in the theatre. In this case, it is a small but somewhat elegant space, meticulously constructed by hand in a barn on a semi rural property. The day has been hot, almost stifling, and four actors are on the stage, going through the final rounds of callbacks. The director won’t begin to tell them how impressed he is, how grateful for their work, their talent, and their dedication. He won’t say any of this now, partly because there will be time for that later, and partly because the handful of people in the theatre are in this moment deep into the landscape of what might be termed “real theatre”–the theatre made up of sweating, crying, whispering, straining, relaxing, staunchly upholding, and collapsing into the movement and the text. This is the bones of plot, character, story. It is a part of that joss for which this small, hot structure was originally built. Blood flowing on the stage, and in the theatre’s veins. The moment is alive.
The actors are working part of a scene from Macbeth, the moment where Ross arrives to tell MacDuff that the latter’s family has been brutally slaughtered by murderers that Macbeth (who has, at this point become a tyrant king of Scotland) had sent in order to kill MacDuff himself. MacDuff had thought that he had left his family safely at home, and he blinks uncomprehendingly at this devastating news.
Like many of us, especially when we hear something that knocks our sun out of the sky, MacDuff feels that he must be mistaken, that he must have heard Ross’s words incorrectly. He asks repeatedly, unable to comprehend what he has heard:
ROSS
(Macbeth 4.3.240-75)
Your castle is surprised, your wife and babes
Savagely slaughtered. To relate the manner
Were on the quarry of these murdered deer
To add the death of you.
MALCOLM Merciful heaven!—
What, man, ne’er pull your hat upon your brows.
Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak
Whispers the o’erfraught heart and bids it break.
MACDUFF My children too?
ROSS
Wife, children, servants, all that could be found.
MACDUFF
And I must be from thence? My wife killed too?
ROSS I have said.
MALCOLM Be comforted.
Let’s make us med’cines of our great revenge
To cure this deadly grief.
MACDUFF
He has no children. All my pretty ones?
Did you say “all”? O hell-kite! All?
What, all my pretty chickens and their dam
At one fell swoop?
MALCOLM Dispute it like a man.
MACDUFF I shall do so,
But I must also feel it as a man.
I cannot but remember such things were
That were most precious to me. Did heaven look on
And would not take their part? Sinful Macduff,
They were all struck for thee! Naught that I am,
Not for their own demerits, but for mine,
Fell slaughter on their souls. Heaven rest them now.
MALCOLM
Be this the whetstone of your sword. Let grief
Convert to anger. Blunt not the heart; enrage it.
MACDUFF
O, I could play the woman with mine eyes
And braggart with my tongue! But, gentle heavens,
Cut short all intermission! Front to front
Bring thou this fiend of Scotland and myself.
Within my sword’s length set him. If he ’scape,
Heaven forgive him too.
A heartbreaking scene, in no small part because it so accurately renders how tragedy may break and remold us. How even the boldest of us stagger under the crushing load of our deepest griefs. Like Lear’s “Never, never, never, never, never” at the loss of his daughter, Cordelia, sometimes cited as Shakespeare’s bleakest single line, MacDuff’s loss reminds us of our own losses, no matter how removed by variance of circumstance.
In this case, in our stuffy little theatre, the actors run through the moment several times, each connecting with their own innate sense of performing loss (of loss itself) until the small audience of production staff are all sniffling slightly while tears light the corners of their eyes. And there it is. That’s the ‘stuff’, the magic. That’s the true pitch and moment of theatre–bringing moments of human joy and grief, staggering and surety to an audience. Making them know it too.
That theatre sometimes fails to do this is a peculiar thing as well, occasionally running to the proverbial luke warm. Sounds of no hands clapping. Bewildering the hand running over emptiness instead of the rough texture and snag that delineates life’s growing living wood. Seldom, if ever, is it the actors’ fault when live theatre falls down. Neither can it be pinned on the director (and certainly not the more technical staff, who spend their own time sweating out hanging instruments and programming sound equipment to show the performers at their very best). More often, it is our collective vision, our own engagement with our lives, removed from ourselves by electronic filters and misdirections.
The arts removed from schools, the music, drama, visual arts taken from our next generations under the guise of budgetary constraint, of needing money for the Pentagon instead of those who might next lead the world. No news reports this. No financial papers cite the incredible cost to human life and understanding that it takes when the arts are murdered, and their cultural contributions to our collective being spirited away to be buried in dark ravines by murderers as dark as any in Macbeth.
Our corrupted King of Scotland is more than a villainous president or a thug prime minister. Our corrupted King is a social acquiescence to greed. For in spite of what Gordon Gekko told us in Wall Street, greed is not good. It robs us from our better selves to set us in pursuit of something else–of dollars, pounds, or euros, or of any currency that may be ‘current’. As Cutler Beckett tells Elizabeth Swan:
. . .loyalty is no longer the currency of the realm as your father believes.
(Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. By Ted Elliott and
. . .
I’m afraid currency is the currency of the realm.
Terry Rossio. Dir. Gore Verbinski. With Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Stellan Skarsgård, Bill Nighy, Jack Davenport, Kevin R. McNally,
Jonathan Pryce. Walt Disney, 2006.)
We are our own bleeding Scotland, bleeding to death in the heat of small theatres, in the withering fields with the sound of locusts already turning their slightly fading trill towards autumn. Fewer crickets in the tall blonded grass. Leaves deepened into that green that presages falling. We fall into a deeper and deeper summer sleep. Extended fire seasons keeping us restless. World’s water supplies vanishing for many. Seas rising. Islands changing, going away.
What will the politicians of today tell their grandchildren? Will they “play the woman” with their own eyes then, when they see the young ones suffer? Still time though, right? Still time to turn this ship around. Edmund Fitzgerald driving on across Lake Superior in November. As the BBC reports, we have a decade or so. Or not. It appears that it may be a good deal shorter than that, whatever others spout:
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48964736
Oh, and in other news the compelling actor Rutger Hauer died. Well, perhaps that’s lucky for him.
Sorry, kids. Had no idea. I thought Capitalism or some similar ideal might save us. I voted such and such a way. Had no idea that it would get this hot. I thought we had time. Oh, well. At least we didn’t succumb to the evils of socialism (which is just like old style Soviet communism, isn’t it). Thank heavens for that!
Is this a dagger which I see before me? The handle towards my hand? Macbeth’s own destruction is rolled part and parcel into the destructive nature of the act he contemplates–an act based on personal gain, on ambition. The two cannot be separated. To commit to the destructive path commits one to one’s own eventual destruction. Once ignited, conflagrations consume everything.
From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. Prescient words indeed, Mr. Frost. That limitless hunger of desire has brought us here, to the edge of the volcano. But our ‘precious’ has become ourselves, melted into the fabric of us, and we can no longer destroy that terrible ring without destroying ourselves as well.
Our actors still play their parts, their beacon fires ignited on small, vanishing stages that have been supplanted by vast forests of glowing screens. “If you don’t like it, you can always leave,” we are told. Leave and go where? Where would have us even if the world weren’t vanishing beneath a tide of accelerated heat. Think this summer’s hot? Think the storms were bad this winter? Wait until next year. No. Really. Wait.
What will the crickets do? Will summer still end for them as it does today? Will they chew clothes in abandoned closets into rags? Will they eat us down to our roasted bones? Will our cars and huge pickup trucks rust away to nothing in fields grown over with our untenanted legacies? Will the world slowly cool again once we are gone?
Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-browed night,
(Romeo and Juliet 3.2.19-25)
Give me my Romeo. And when I shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
Photographer/ethnographer, Edward S. Curtis, who was famous for photographing Native Americans (not always accurately, to be fair, for he needed to make a living too, albeit his concern seemed genuine). He called this picture (of riding Diné or Navajo) “The Vanishing Race”:
Although he was thinking of Native Americans, how much this photo now seems to reflect us all.
In the end, perhaps the opening photo, the one with no people on the road, will be most accurate. The lack of academic or artistic jobs will hardly matter then, as perhaps it hardly matters now. For the most part, it seems we have already stopped thinking. Now, we are screaming. Quietly just yet, but soon that caterwauling may prevail, thundering earth and skies with wanton grief at visions of graves on graves, while the larger Scotland that is our world sinks into seas of our own making.
Our artistic vision, and the engagement with our world that stems from that, evaporates like the arts in our schools. Perhaps Betsy Devos bookends to the myth of Betsy Ross. First flag to last flag of the Republic. Like these photos. People on the road to empty road. Like our imagination, our too too sullied flesh, our aesthetic and our broader understanding fading under the brunt of our stunning progress. Riding down a road into the distant hills, disengagement lighting the way to dusty death.
For who will set our memory into little stars to pin it in the vagrant sky? Will we simply be like all MacDuff’s “pretty chickens and their dam”? Gone in a gasping roasting moment, heaving our last into a furnace world that burns us all in spite of whatever money we may have, ended by murderers we elected and licensed, to end us, our children, and our world? At one fell swoop.