With last week’s opening of Macbeth — or The Scottish Play, for superstitious readers — all of the Illinois Shakespeare Festival’s three 2024 productions are now open at the Ewing Cultural Center.
Macbeth runs in repertory with Twelfth Night and Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility through the first week of August and is the final tragedy of artistic director John Stark’s ISF career.
“It’s my favorite play and I’ve never gotten to design it,” said Stark, who is a scenic designer in addition to artistic director.
Stark retired from Illinois State University last year and extended his role at ISF through the end of this season. Associate artistic director and Twelfth Night director Robert Quinlan will lead the 2025 festival.
“It’s sort of interesting that all of the plays start with some sort of tragic event,” Stark said. “In Twelfth Night we have a shipwreck with separation of twins; we have death of a patriarch in Sense and Sensibility; and there’s a war going on at the beginning of Macbeth.”
Set in Scotland, Macbeth begins with the eponymous general in battle. He receives a prophecy from three witches, called the Weird Sisters, that he will one day be king. Taking matters into his own hands, and on the urging of his wife, Macbeth murders King Duncan and is crowned king as Duncan’s heirs flee to England. More murder and madness ensue as Macbeth seeks to protect himself and gerrymander the Weird Sisters’ prophecies to fit his own narrative.
For his Illinois Shakes debut, director Corey Allen opted to stay true to the text.
“My approach has been honoring the text, bringing it to this present moment,” he said. “The story is timeless. Ambition is timeless. War is timeless. Being tempted by something you know you probably shouldn’t do — but do anyway — is a timeless thing.”
Allen describes the setting as “the Scotland of our conjuring.”
“It’s as if someone in the future reached back into the moment the play is set and pulled it forward,” he said.
Costume and scenic designs [Nannette Acosta and Stark, respectively] are referential, not literal, with stone archways and wooden lattice adorning the festival’s standard two-story set. Partial kilts are worn over tight jeans. Studded accessories hint at armor — part medieval, part punk.
“It’s not quite specific,” Allen said.
Shakespeare, meet 'Survivor'
For his ISF debut, veteran Shakespeare actor Tevin Davis plays Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night, John Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility and Ross in Macbeth. But Davis is most recently known for appearing on season 46 of the CBS reality show, Survivor.
“I told Corey I’m treating this like Survivor,” Davis said. “You are trying to discern what direction to take to get order back— to get the hierarchy back that has completely fallen apart. Trusting one person that you should have distrusted can cost you, in this world, your life — and in the Survivor world, your game.”
Davis emerged as a leader and strong personality on Survivor; in Macbeth, Ross is a tertiary character who is primarily a messenger. Davis identifies with Ross’ inherent goodness, if not his methods.
“He’s very aligned to order and loyalty,” Davis said. “He’s aligned to what’s right. I align myself with that 1,000%. Where we differ is that Ross, unlike me, withholds sometimes. I let it all out. I say what I need to say. Ross is very calculated on how he moves.”
A successful strategy, one might say, for a Survivor contestant.
“He’s trying to get information so he can successfully figure out where the gaps are so that he can try to rectify that,” Davis said. “Because he does want order.”
Who to root for
Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are not the only characters seeking power and influence, though they perhaps receive the most severe consequences in the pursuit. It is therefore difficult to figure out who to root for in a story filled with death, deceit and destruction.
“There’s an argument to be made that The Weird Sisters are the protagonist of the play,” Allen said. “I don’t think Shakespeare would go that far, but I think the humans in the play have very strong needs.”
If Macbeth is what his wife says, for example, “a man full of the milk of human kindness,” then The Scottish play is, indeed a tragedy. Allen said even Lady Macbeth could be seen as the play’s anti-hero.
“If you view her desire to be queen or to see her husband-king as a basic need because she’s empty, she lacks something, she’s sort of the protagonist of the play,” he said. “There is a line, or an order or structure of the way things should be. The minute you disrupt that, chaos and bad things happen. For my money, whoever wants to maintain the chain of being is the protagonist of the play.”
Past as prologue
While fictional, Macbeth draws from historical figures and dramatizes the danger of seeking political and social capital. As countries around the world flirt with autocracy, it’s impossible to avoid the parallels Shakespeare offers to the present.
“The play is a cautionary tale,” Allen said. “We all get options. You get told something. How you choose to act once you receive that information is up to you. It is a warning for us in the moment we’re in to take stock of where we are. If there are two roads diverging in front of us, what is the road that we choose to take, and are we prepared to suffer whatever consequences may come?”
Macbeth, Twelfth Night and Sense and Sensibility run in rotation at the Illinois Shakespeare Festival through the first week of August. Check illinoisshakes.com for tickets, and a complete schedule of productions, pre-show concerts, post-show talks, food truck line up, etc.
