Macshush!
Theater Superstition Warns of Double Trouble if the Name Is Spoken

By David Segal
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 13, 2006

NEW YORK

Caution be damned. The three women playing the Weird Sisters in the Shakespeare in the Park production of "Macbeth," previews of which begin tomorrow night, are not afraid to utter the scariest word in the history of theater. They do not fear the two modest syllables, the seven measly letters that have inspired heebie-jeebies among actors and directors for 400 years.

Listen and learn, you cowering simps. These women will just come right out and say it: "Macbeth."

Correction. They are a little afraid of the word. Hold on. Maybe they are more than a little afraid. Except that "afraid" doesn't quite capture it. What's the right way to put this? They are mildly creeped out by the word "Macbeth." Still, they are saying it.

"I heard of a guy who was playing Macbeth who was run over by a car," says Lynn Cohen, who plays Weird Sister 3, as the character is listed in the program.

"Oh my God," gasps Ching Valdes-Aran, Weird Sister 2.

"I heard of another Macbeth who was shot in the jaw," says Joan MacIntosh, aka WS1. "The actors were coming out of a restaurant, I think."

This is what happens when theater people gather to discuss what is arguably Shakespeare's goriest tragedy. They share "Macbeth" horror stories, which are all about freak accidents and perforated bowels. By universal consensus, "Macbeth" is the unluckiest play ever written, a work so fiasco-plagued, so thoroughly jinxed that it is considered bad form -- nay, it is considered flat-out reckless -- to speak its title aloud.

"Most people call it 'The Scottish Play.' Or 'Mackers,' " says MacIntosh. "I know people who wouldn't be caught dead saying anything but Mackers."

But here's the tricky part: What if you are actually performing "Macbeth"? Then what do you do? The guy's name is all over the text. You can't just substitute "Scottish Play" every time he's mentioned, can you?

A few weeks ago, the newly hired cast members of this production, including the Macbeth of the show, Liev Schreiber, confronted this very question. When they gathered to introduce themselves in a rehearsal room at the Public Theater, the force behind Shakespeare in the Park, there was a lot of "Hello, my name is so-and-so, and I play so-and-so in the Scottish play." Nobody spoke the unspeakable. Not until the Public's artistic director, Oskar Eustis, explained that the superstition did not apply to anyone involved in a production while it is being produced.

This makes practical sense. But if you avoided black cats your whole life it might be hard, one day, to take home a dozen, even if someone told you that black cats, at least for a limited time, are just pets. An irrational fear in motion tends to stay in motion. Superstitions have a momentum all their own.

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.

Whatever the curse's origins, there is no disagreement in the theater world about the play's treacherous history. A quick survey:

· When "Macbeth" opened in 1606, a boy named Hal Berridge, who was playing Lady Macbeth, died of a fever. Shakespeare himself replaced the lad.

· In 1849, two productions of "Macbeth" were staged simultaneously in New York, and the leads -- one an American, the other British -- were feuding. A crowd of thousands showed up at the Astor Place Opera House to pelt and protest the appearance of the latter, a famous Shakespearean actor named William Charles Macready. (This is back when people took theater very seriously.) When the protest became a riot, the authorities fired into the crowd, killing more than 20 people.

· In April 1865, Abraham Lincoln took a copy of "Macbeth" on a cruise down the Potomac. A few days later, he was assassinated.

· Three cast members died during a 1942 production of the play, starring John Gielgud, and a costume person committed suicide.

· The ghost of British actor Harold Norman turns up every Thursday at the Coliseum Theatre in Oldham, the same day he was accidentally stabbed in a swordfight during a performance of the play in 1947. He was rushed to the hospital and later died of peritonitis.

· Charlton Heston was burned on the groin on the opening night of a "Macbeth" he did in Bermuda in 1953. During the burning-castle scene, his tights were inadvertently soaked in kerosene and caught fire.

· A Broadway production starring Christopher Plummer churned through cast and crew: a handful of Macduffs, several directors, a few stage managers, light designers and so on. A couple dozen people caught the flu. Plummer pulled a ligament and broke a tooth.

You need more?

"I had a really close friend who was directing the play in St. Paul," says MacIntosh. "And on opening night, his leading actor had a heart attack. Nobody knew it was happening, except for Charles, who ran up onstage and held the actor in his arms, and the actor died in his arms."

While some of the examples above are surely false -- the events of 1606, for instance -- others really happened. (The man playing Macbeth in St. Paul did die onstage on opening night, at age 32.) The rest fall into the broad and glorious journalistic category known as "too good to check."

Macspit

"Look, Latinos are very superstitious, Jews are very superstitious, and theater people are very superstitious," says Moises Kaufman, director of the Public Theater's "Macbeth." "And I am all three, okay? So I am a very, very, very superstitious person."

Every theater actor, it seems, has at least a couple of superstitions: Never wear yellow (or green; it varies) to a rehearsal, no peacock feathers allowed in the theater, never give an actor an apple before a show, no whistling in any part of the building. Among the acts considered good luck: pinching, throwing coal into an empty gallery, saying the French word for poop, and -- the best for last -- spitting in someone's face.

"Oh, yeah," says Lynn Cohen, nodding. "That's a big one. The first time someone spat in my face, I was surprised. But I knew it was done with love. And there's not a lot of saliva involved. It's just, you know." Then she air-kissed an invisible someone, European-style, except she added a spitting noise on both sides.

"I was rehearsing with a French company once and I showed up in something green and everyone said, 'You have to take that off,' " MacIntosh recalls. "I told them I didn't have anything else to wear and they said, 'Well, you can't wear that.' "

Why is the theater so superstitious? The question was posed to Kaufman, who at the time was sitting on a stool in the main rehearsal room. He was smiling in a way that suggested he'd like to be anywhere other than right here, in this room, discussing superstition.

"Why. Hmmm," he said. Then he looked to a member of the crew, a woman typing on a laptop. "Do you have any idea?" he asked.

"Control," she said, barely pausing to look up. "It's because theater people are not in control."

It's a pretty good working assumption: The less in control one feels, the more likely one is to believe that being spit on, for instance, confers protection from the fates, and perhaps good luck, too. Baseball is superstition-laden, and it is no coincidence that it is known as "the game of inches." If you are lucky, those inches will make the difference between winning and losing -- between catching a ball and dropping it, between a home run and a warning-track catch.

Theater is similar.

"Every time you go out there, there is nothing standing between you and fate," MacIntosh says. "You could fall flat on your face, or you could soar with the gods."

"Or forget your lines," says Valdes-Aran.

"Literally, an actor could die right in front of you onstage," says Cohen.

So does anyone worry that all this "Macbeth" talk could bring on the worst when the play opens in Central Park? (There has already been a very minor snafu: Previews were supposed to start tonight but were delayed a day because of rain.) Pose this question to Kaufman and it's suddenly clear that he's been giving succinct answers not because he is bored, as it initially appears, or distracted. It's because he is scared.

"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."