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"MacBeth"
Our old friend, Bill Shakespeare, has turned up again, this time, as the author of a stirring voodoo melodrama, laid in the wilds of Haiti, which is drawing record crowds at Harlem's Lafayette Theater. It is really just "Macbeth" which Orson Orson Wells, a talented young playwright, has arranged for the W.P.A unit of negro actors. For anyone accustomed to the atmosphere of revered antiquity and the singing cadences with which Shakespeare is usually declaimed, this performance is a great shock but not necessarily an unpleasant one. The script has been very much "jazzed up." The scene sequences have been changed, liberties have been taken with the characters, all in the interest of the swift pace at which this production is sustained. Such bits of immortality as "tomorrow and tomorrow . . . " are recited as offhandedly as present day speeches would be. The costumes make a gorgeous riot of color on the stage Though the set which depicts the view of Cawdor's ancestral home was competently done, the one most people remember is Nat Karson's superb representation of the Haitian jungle. The most effective scenes of the play take place here, where skeletonic palms brood over the voodoo rites. In addition to the three witches and Hecate, the leader, to whom the immortal bard has introduced us there is a group of auxiliary sorcerers (on the stage) whose rhythmic movements accompany the remorseless drum beats. Add, as the producers did, a jabbering painted witch-doctor, sizzling and boiling in a fiery cauldron, and you have one of the most effective stage scenes imaginable. Because of this unusual setting a note of true authenticity is struck which somehow seems lacking when the same doom-laden hags gather on the moors of Scotland, as is their usual custom. Inasmuch as this production is a Federal Theatre Project, good tickets can be bought for as little as twenty-five cents. The address of the Lafayette Theatre is 2225 Seventh Avenue, near 132nd Street.
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