Macshush!

"I'm not talking about this anymore! You've got my last answer. Next subject! I don't want to talk about it anymore. We can talk about anything else."

Then he points to a wooden staircase that is being used in rehearsal.

"Look," he smiles and shrugs. "We built a staircase and it hasn't fallen apart. So we're doing okay."

"Macbeth," of course, has been performed thousands of times without incident. In search of a more typical, and more uneventful, story about the staging of the play, a call was placed last week to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which performs it every eight or nine years.

You guys don't have any "Macbeth" nightmare stories, do you?

A spokesman for the theater said he would look into it. A few minutes later he faxed an article from an Oregon newspaper, the Medford Mail Tribune.

Dated March 14, 2002, it was the account of a contractor who had been helping to install the electrical system at the festival's New Theatre. The guy was in the middle of a divorce and when he went to visit his soon-to-be ex-wife, he was shot dead by a man helping her move.

Want to guess what play was the first performed in the New Theatre?

How about the dead man's name?

That would be John Alan McBeth.

"It's one of those things you can't make up," said Eddie Wallace, the festival spokesman, "because no one would believe it."