Macshush!

So the Weird Sisters -- they're also referred to as witches, though these three actresses dislike the term -- are sitting on a sofa one recent afternoon, in a rehearsal room. They are gamely trying to ignore the warnings and chilling anecdotes they have collected over the years.

It isn't easy.

"There are so many things in life to get hung up on, I just decided I don't need another one," says Cohen, whom fans of "Sex in the City" might remember for her recurring role as a maid. "If it means I stink in the play, I stink in the play. I'd just as soon not get run over by a car, but so many other things in my life make me crazy, I just let this one go."

"I just want to be safe, know what I mean?" says MacIntosh. "So I believe that if there is any truth to the superstition, it won't be true here."

"You know," says Valdes-Aran, twisting a little nervously in her seat, "I was fine until we started this interview."

Backstory

How "Macbeth" acquired such a sinister reputation is a matter of dispute. The play, for those in need of a quick primer, concerns a Scottish general who is spurred by his own ambition as well as the prophetic incantations of the Weird Sisters -- not to mention the merciless noodgings of his coldblooded wife -- to murder and usurp the King of Scotland. This ends badly, to say the least, with Lady Macbeth a suicide and her hubby a rueful, morally repulsive cretin who is eventually killed, thus restoring order to the universe. It's a brutal tale, filled with infanticide, torture, stabbing and body parts. At one point, horses go insane and eat each other.

"It's a shot out of hell, this play," says Harold Bloom, the Yale professor of English and author of several books on Shakespeare. "It has a kind of demonic drive to it. And it's remorseless. It takes you on a journey deep into the interior of this character, everybody else fades out, and you must inhabit the imagination of a man who no sooner thinks of something terrible than he has done it."

"Macbeth" was written when Shakespeare was in his early forties and already the most famous dramatist in England. It's often said he was pandering to the tastes and interests of King James I, who was both terrified of and fascinated by witches. (The king wrote a book on the subject.)

"James believed that witches made him impotent and disrupted his wedding, and he actually tortured and killed a lot of people over these insane charges," says Stephen Greenblatt, author of "Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare." But Greenblatt doesn't buy the idea that Shakespeare was catering to the king. "The witches are truly scary," he says, "and they're not punished in the end."

The Weird Sisters cast spells using, among other items, human lips and the finger of a newly strangled baby. Naturally, the first bad-luck theory of "Macbeth" is that Shakespeare wove authentic spells into it, which means that it will inevitably unleash evil spirits and mayhem. Or maybe the black magic annoys the "real" witches out there, and all the spooky fallout is their revenge. Depends on whom you ask.

A more mundane explanation is that because "Macbeth" is a violent crowd-pleaser of a show, it has often been performed as a last-ditch effort by theatrical companies in financial trouble. Those companies that the show doesn't save wind up bankrupt, which has led theater people to associate the play with disaster.

One last theory: The curse stems from the difficulty of staging the play successfully. The second act is basically Macbeth's comeuppance, which everyone sees coming, and maintaining the velocity and suspense of the first act is said to have foiled talents as great as Orson Welles and Roman Polanski.