By SHARON EBERSON
For more than a year, two Pittsburgh actors have been assessing William Shakespeare’s Macbeth anew, with the purpose of coaxing from the text something fresh and meaningful to them and a 21st-century audience.
Brett Sullivan and Alyssa Herron are readying the results, Lady Lord Macbeth, for a one-night, soldout premiere on September 8, 2024, at the historic Woods House in Hazelwood, a 230-year-old structure that has been repurposed as a pub.
The Scottish play’s reinvention is in the title, hyperfocused on the doomed duo and whittled to an hour with no intermission, all while using the Bard’s words.
as Lady Lord Macbeth. (Image courtesy of Brett Sullivan Santry)
Lady Lord Macbeth is described on the website as inviting an audience to sit “at bed and board with the entwined couple as their power, ambition and raw ache rage within and without on their journey to the throne. … By distilling this play to its barest sinew — two partners alone in their war against loss of soul and legacy — we get to experience the crush, joy and release of the total submission and entanglement of love.”
Sullivan, who lives nearby The Woods House, is a regular presence on Pittsburgh stages, as well as a director, teaching artist, and dramaturg. He holds MFA and MLitt degrees from Mary Baldwin University’s Shakespeare in Performance program, as well as a BA in Playwriting and Directing from Goddard College. This will be his fifth production working with Herron.
Lady Lord Macbeth “is an entirely independent venture,” Sullivan said before a recent preview in Hazelwood’s Spartan Community Center.
It comes from his own unfulfilled desire to be in a punk rock band, he said, and started with a text message to Herron.
“So Alyssa and I sat down with a list of dream projects – we’d had some real success with Streetcar Named Desire [with Pittsburgh Classic Players] and really enjoyed working with each other on Detroit [12 Peers Theater] and a couple other projects – and we really wanted to find another vehicle with each other to work on.”
From there, Sullivan Santry and Herron decided to rehearse just the scenes between Lord and Lady Macbeth, as written, and see if they could create “a short devised piece, laser focused on the relationship.
Working with director Dylan Marquis Meyers and stage manager Gwen Gibson, they have created what Sullivan called “an alternative reality for the Macbeths,” and “a one hour piece that is very quick and sort of furious, and punk rock.”
A big part of the inspiration for what the re-molding of Macbeth derives from an empathetic explanation for the warrior Lord and manipulative Lady, as they commit murder to feed their ambition.
“We kept realizing as we went that the story is kind of a triangulation, because there is always … a third character present that you never see, and that’s their lost heir,” Sullivan said. “And then from that, we started informing that narrative with our own personal experiences, both being parents and actors of a certain age. We asked, ‘What if we were inhabiting these roles, and that’s not the only child that we’ve lost, and maybe the last one that we were able to have?’ ”
Another motivating factor is that, as a Girl Dad, Sullivan has exploring works with the attitude that “the future is female.”
“With The Crucible [Vigilance Theatre] and with Streetcar, and with a couple of other plays … I have had these brilliant young female directors and co-creators that have given me the opportunity to reinterpret a couple of roles that were representative of a toxic kind of masculinity, and now I am more than happy to help deconstruct to find the future of some of these classic plays for new audiences,” Sullivan said. “I think that that’s part of what I’m working on with my character, and what we’re working on with this play, too.”
In considering a title for their adaptation, putting Lady before Lord was a “manifestation of what we’re trying to do with the narrative,” he added. As the engine that drives her husband’s ambition, Lady Macbeth, in their interpretation, would “be on equal footing” with her husband.
There are moments of humor, to be certain, including the original’s drunken Porter, who will be portrayed by guest artists as the play finds its footing in the coming weeks.
After a year of work, Sullivan is more than ready to put the show on its feet and in front of an audience. Many audiences, in fact.
“We were looking for nontraditional venues like The Woods House … anywhere that has an 8 by 10 space that we can pop the show up into,” Sullivan said. “The idea is to take it on tour next summer, and those plans are in the works.”
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Learn more about Lady Lord Macbeth at https://ladylord-macbeth.mailchimpsites.com/. The production encourages support for
The Alexis Joy Foundation, helping families with issues such as postpartum depression, infertility and infant or child loss. Visit https://www.alexisjoyfoundation.org/ to learn more.
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