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As a child, Marcella Kearns enjoyed her father’s storytelling. One of her favorites was his take on Shakespeare’s famous “Scottish play,” as Macbeth is called by superstitious theater folk who want to avoid the curse that speaking the name threatens to bring. Now a much-loved director, actor, and Assistant Artistic Director at Milwaukee Chamber Theatre, Kearns is directing Macbeth with the First Stage Young Company.
“My Air Force father would tell me how this Scottish ruler, after basically saving his people, met his downfall through a bunch of soldiers who camouflaged themselves as trees and made the forest move. So before I knew who Shakespeare was, I was in love with Shakespeare. This is the play that taught me to love him.”
The Young Company Director Matt Daniels chose Macbeth as the play to open the Milwaukee Youth Arts Center’s new Goodman Mainstage Hall, a brilliantly designed, intimate theatre-in-the-round that will bring viewers close to the tale. By far the shortest and fastest paced of the great tragedies, Macbeth is “scarily of the moment,” Daniels says. It’s Shakespeare as his best.
The Young Company’s high schoolers love it, Kearns says. “The idea I posed when we started working on it was that, yes, this play is full of ghosts and witches, magic, evil, murder; but the scariest things to me are, first, the false face which comes up again and again, the face one might put on to another when they have other designs in mind. That a person would betray a friend is more terrifying to me than a witch. And second, at the end we have 10,000 English soldiers being welcomed into Scotland and a Scottish prince being crowned king and saying, ‘My thanes and kinsmen, henceforth be earls, the first that ever Scotland named.’ It’s a new power structure and in many ways a new culture walking on another.”
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The Kearns family’s ancestry is Scottish. Kearns is well-versed in Britain’s long history of cultures subsuming cultures. “And when Matt first asked me to do the play, the first thing I thought of was the Scots that were protesting Brexit,” she tells me.
Endlessly Relevant
I asked about the current headlines. “We were staging an opening sequence, before the witches speak, in which we see the Scottish people in conflict,” she answers. “It’s a brief movement piece; Macbeth and Banquo and the others fighting off invaders. And I look at my phone and it’s the night that Russia invaded Ukraine. So that has been a part of the rehearsal process all along. Sometimes we speak of it, sometimes we don’t, but it’s present.”
“The idea that someone who helps save his country can then become a tyrant, to the point when he cannot be satisfied with his security in power, is endlessly relevant,” she says.
There are 14 young actors in the cast. “Double, double, toil and trouble,” say the witches famously, and one of Kearns’ appealing decisions was to cast many of the actors in several roles. The actors playing witches, for example, appear as figures in Macbeth’s household. Actors playing murdered folk return as murderers. An actor plays a father and his murdered son. The Scottish prince is played by the actor who plays the witches’ overlord Hecate.
Kearns is a member of the Young Company faculty. The students are actors in training. The curriculum largely mirrors that of a college undergraduate acting program. The students can choose to audition or not. If cast, they rehearse as they would for a first Stage mainstage show, five times each week for about five weeks. Acting is the focus. Designs are minimal.
“Teachers can only go so far,” Kearns says. “Young Company members are self-driven. These young people are the future leaders of our industry and many other industries, not only because they are humble and kind but because they bring everything of themselves—their growing skills, their passion, their courage, their commitment to art. They understand what it means to uphold a sacred duty to story. They are the storytellers, the keepers of the light.”
Performances are March 25-April 3 at Milwaukee Youth Arts Center, 325 W. Walnut St. Macbeth is suggested for families with young people ages 13+. Visit firststage.org for details.
