Macbeth Black Cat Pdf [WORK] Download
Marcelene Pape
The "Voodoo Macbeth," as this all-black version set in 19th century Haiti came to be called, was notable on several counts. It was one of four Manhattan premieres in the spring of 1936 that solidified the shaky reputation of the Federal Theater Project, the most controversial of the Works Progress Administration's arts programs. (The project had been under fire since its founding in August 1935 for spending taxpayers' money on salaries without actually providing much theater for the public to see.) Macbeth launched the meteoric directing career of Orson Welles, not yet 21 when it opened, who would go on to astonish New York theatergoers with several more bold stage productions before departing for Hollywood in 1939. It gave African-American performers, usually restricted to dancing and singing for white audiences, a chance to prove they were capable of tackling the classics.
Macbeth, however, began quietly enough in the fall of 1935 when John Houseman became the head of the FTP's Negro Unit in New York. Hallie Flanagan, the project's fiesty national director, wanted an African-American leader, but the black professionals she consulted felt that a white man would give the unit additional prestige and clout. The 33-year-old Houseman had directed the Virgil Thomson-Gertrude Stein opera Four Saints in Three Acts, and his work with the show's all-black cast convinced Flanagan that he had the sensitivity and tact required of a white administrator running an African-American company.
Houseman had to skirt some political land mines in selecting material for the Negro Unit. African-American theater was in decline by the 1930s-the victim, ironically, of the smashing success in the '20s of all-black musicals like Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake's Shuffle Along, which prompted white investors to get into a business formerly dominated by black theater owners and producers. As a result, resident stock companies like Chicago's Pekin Theatre and New York's Lafayette Players, which had produced plays about African-American life as well as the musicals popular with both blacks and whites, withered. There were serious plays in the 1920s with African-American protagonists, but The Emperor Jones, In Abraham's Bosom and Porgy all had white authors. "The Negro theatre has not really progressed," commented the Baltimore Afro-American in 1933. "It has merely been absorbed."
Harlem audiences, Houseman concluded, would be offended by uptown productions of racial dramas written from a white point of view. And in the militant atmosphere of the '30s, the revues and musicals that had gained mainstream acceptance for many black performers "were regarded as 'handkerchief-head' and so, for our purposes, anathema," as he worte in his memoirs. He solved his immediate problem by launching the Negro Unit with two contemporary plays written by well-known African-Americans. But neither Frank Wilson's earnest, awkward Walk Together Chillun! nor Rudolph Fisher's slick Conjur Man Dies was the kind of ambitious fare Houseman hoped to present.
Inspired by the example of Four Saints in Three Acts, for which he and Virgil Thomson cast black singers as 16th-century Spaniards solely on the basis of their voices and physical presence, Houseman decided that one part of the Negro Unit should do classical plays "without concession or reference to color." He knew exactly who he wanted to direct this audacious enterprise: the "monstrous boy" whose performance as Tybalt in Katharine Cornell's Romeo and Juliet had overwhelmed him one year earlier, and with whom he had talked throughout the spring of 1935 about creating contemporary versions of Elizabethan drama. This actor's only directing experiences were a high-school production of Julius Caesar and a summer festival performance of Trilby in Illinois.
Rehearsals began with a good deal of tension in the air. The Harlem community was not at all sure what it thought of "Shakespeare in blackface" directed by a white man. Some African-Americans feared the production would make their race look ridiculous. One local zealot, convinced that Macbeth's director was deliberately creating a travesty to humiliate blacks, attacked Welles with a razor in the Lafayette Theater lobby, apparently without hurting him. Within the FTP, a memo complained that Macbeth was consuming a disproportionate percentage of the Negro Unit's budget and staff time - a comment that seemed borne out by the elaborate costumes and vivid sets taking shape in Nat Karson's designs. (In fact the scenic budget was a mere $2,000, low even in the '30s, though generous by the standards of the FTP.)
The critics were a bit bewildered by it all. They couldn't help but respond to the production's swirling excitement and lush imagery (the black-and-white photographs in the Federal Theater Project archives at the Library of Congress, alas, give little sense of the riot of color that exploded on the Lafayette Theatre stage), and most realized that transposing the scene to Haiti gave the witches an effectiveness they seldom had in contemporary presentations. Some critics carped, however, that this radical rethinking of Macbeth "wasn't Shakespeare at all" but rather "an experiment in Afro-American showmanship." Percy Hammond of the anti-New Deal Herald Tribune went further and called the show "an exhibition of de-luxe boondoggling," complaining that the government was squandering taxpayer dollars on a wasteful vanity production no commercial producer would be insane enough to undertake. When Hammond died suddenly a few days later, a rumor circulated among the Negro Unit staff that he was the victim of malevolent spells cast by the enraged voodoo drummers.
The Voodoo Macbeth certainly cast a spell over audiences, which did not share the critics' reservations. It ran for 10 sold-out weeks at the Lafayette, then moved downtown for a 10-day run at the Adelphi Theatre before going on tour to FTP theaters in Bridgeport, Hartford, Dallas, Indianapolis, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Syracuse. It also inspired Negro units in other cities to adapt the classics: Seattle's did an all-black Lysistrata, closed by WPA officials who found Aristophanes' verse "too risque," and when Los Angeles couldn't get the Welles Macbeth, the unit produced its own, set in Africa. Cincinnati did not make Macbeth's touring schedule because local authorities said the audience would have to be segregated, which was against FTP policy; at all WPA productions, blacks could sit anywhere, not just in the balcony.
Independent African-American companies did not spring up to take the place of the Negro units, and without such institutional support serious black playwrights floundered until galvanized by the civil-rights movement. After 1939, black actors were once again relegated to stereotyped roles in mainstream white shows, and the black technicians trained by the FTP were excluded from every theatrical union in the United States. It would be two decades before the actors and technicians who had gained employment and artistic self-respect on Macbeth and the other Federal Theater Project productions would again find sustained work in the theater.
With gaffer Mike Bauman, Delbonnel created soft fill light for the sets and lit with much harder, contrasty light on faces in the foreground. Because the resulting images would be black and white, color temperature was not a significant concern.
Delbonnel shot with the Arri Alexa LF camera and Cooke lenses, captured in the rich ArriRaw file format. Monitors on the set displayed the images in black and white, although the camera sensor was capturing the full range of color information. He says he almost never pushes beyond 800 ISO, and usually stays at 500.
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