"Macbeth In Stride" Kills It At The Yale Rep

Whitney White (foreground) with Ciara Alyse Harris, Holli’ Conway, and Phoenix Best in a scene from Macbeth in Stride written and performed by Whitney White, directed by Taibi Magar and Tyler Dobrowsky, choreographed by Raja Feather Kelly. Yale Repertory Theatre, December 5-14, 2024. Photo © Joan Marcus.

Lady Macbeth is finally Queen—and her first order of the day is taking it to church. To her right, drummer Barbara “MD” Duncan cues in the praise break, with hammering, vibrant percussion that spills from the stage to the audience. Bass and guitar creep in, the sound big and bright enough to reach the rafters. Quick footfalls enter the fray, as if the holy spirit is moving through the space.

She turns toward the audience, just getting started. Three witches dance with abandon, the leather fringe of their skirts flying. Rose petals, soft and trampled underfoot, are momentarily forgotten. Incense still hangs low in the air. This is Sunday service. This is Shakespeare. This is reclamation, the way it was always meant to feel.

Worship, literary critique, rite and ritual all meet Shakespeare in Whitney White’s Macbeth In Stride, running at the Yale Repertory Theatre through Dec. 14. A fierce, fast-paced and mellifluous retelling of Macbeth, it reimagines the play from Lady Macbeth’s point of view, giving her the voice that the playwright never did.

In so doing, White subverts, challenges, and plays with dominant narrative, writing a love letter to Black women (and queer women, and women of color, and just women) that is also somehow a love letter to the Bard.

She doesn’t do any of it alone: a rockstar cast includes three witches (Holli’ Conway, Phoenix Best and Ciara Alyse Harris), a live band, and “Man” (Charlie Thurston), presumably a stand-in for Macbeth and for so many men who have come before and after him. It is sumptuously directed by Taibi Magar and Tyler Dobrowsky, with choreography from Raja Feather Kelly. Tickets and more information are available here.

Whitney White in a scene from Macbeth in Stride written and performed by Whitney White, directed by Taibi Magar and Tyler Dobrowsky, choreographed by Raja Feather Kelly. Yale Repertory Theatre, December 5-14, 2024. Photo © Joan Marcus.

“Nothing is for free, and if you want to get anything, it will cost you,” White said during a visit to New Haven Adult & Continuing Education Tuesday, before a Thursday performance for the Rep’s Will Power! initiative (more on that below). “And what’s the cost of that? That’s what’s in my heart right now. In the world we live in, if you want to get somewhere, there’s always a tradeoff. And I think the lead character, she’s thinking very much about, what’s it gonna cost her to get what she wants?”

Her take, which has as much wit and moxie as it does glam, starts with the seventeenth-century text itself. Macbeth, written in 1606 and performed publicly at the Globe Theatre five years later, tells the story of Macbeth, Thane of Glamis, and the bloody pursuit of power that ultimately drives him insane. As the play goes, Macbeth has returned to Scotland from war—much to the praise and adulation of the king, Duncan—when three witches (also called the Weïrd Sisters) appear before him. They predict that he will be king and that his friend and comrade, Banquo, will also be the father of kings.

Macbeth doesn’t know what to make of it; he’s kind of stupefied by the whole thing. But his wife does: she plants the seed that he kill Duncan and become king. Where he is fretful and indecisive, she is calculated and cold-blooded. When she says “Yet do I fear thy nature;. It is too full o' the milk of human kindness,” she’s saying that she doesn’t know if he has the balls to see it through. When Macbeth finally announces that he’s done it, she’s intoxicated with the scent of power, and also annoyed that he has done so more clumsily than she would have.

In the hours and days that follow the murder—which begets more murders, because of course it does—Macbeth descends into a state of madness, so wracked by his guilt that it is not a complete surprise when he ends up at the other end of a sword. White deftly weaves this into her retelling, with lines from Shakespeare that marry contemporary music making with praise, opera, pop and jazz (“'Yet do I fear thy nature” is followed by an original song about a doll she had as a little girl, setting in parallel the expectations placed on her and Lady Macbeth from birth). In the Shakespeare, she disappears until she goes mad. In White's take, this is a central point worth questioning. 

If it’s a character arc that sounds familiar, it should—at least to any woman who has ever made it through a day of adult life. White questions everything, from the narrative itself (“So what’s the story?”) to the witches’ positionality (are they her sister-friends or something more slippery?) to Shakespeare’s suggestion that she may have lost a child (“If a woman is unhappy, it must be about a child,” she announces to the audience at one point, and a listener can hear the tired, aching rage in her voice) to the point of power itself. 

The cast in a scene from Macbeth in Stride written and performed by Whitney White, directed by Taibi Magar and Tyler Dobrowsky, choreographed by Raja Feather Kelly. Yale Repertory Theatre, December 5-14, 2024. Photo © Joan Marcus.

In this sense, it’s much more than just a retelling: White is interested in pulling Shakespeare’s work apart, and figuring out where and how and why she fits into this story. She breaks the fourth wall, looping the audience in and asking for everything from affirmation to live participation. She cuts through thick, layered critique with sharp humor, the kind that makes a person laugh because the alternative is crying. She makes her way through a feminism that is more bell hooks than Gloria Steinem while folding original music into a revered, centuries-old text.

She tries to take up space, and when she can’t, she questions that too. “Who says I can’t have both?” she says of love and power, and acts put off when the witches answer “Time/Space/the World/the Bible” like an incantation. “But why not give power just to me?” she asks at another point, and laughter inevitably, cruelly follows. Some time later, she does it with no words at all, leaning forward to play an accordion that Man holds at his chest, somewhere between moody musicianship and making an offering. 

She’s never doing it alone (would this be an accurate play about women if she were?). Even before White-As-Woman enters, the witches set the tone, summoning the lights as they raise and lower their arms, long fingers gliding through the air. In this version, they are presented as backup singers, with constant choreography and costume changes that take them from simple black cassocks and headscarves to slinky, woven purple tops and skirts with leather fringe (a nod to costume designer Qween Jean).

Unlike the Weïrd Sisters, they remain onstage for the entire show, with sound and movement that is somewhere between Destiny’s Child and a Greek chorus. That’s part of White’s interrogation of dominant narratives: these witches ask questions, push back, invoke both past and present, and make the vocals into a dazzling, layered locomotive.

In this performance, the play belongs to them as much as it belongs to White. Conway, who came into the show from Six and plays the first witch, is particularly dynamic in this role: she glides around the stage, constantly in motion, with a mysterious glint in her eye that her vocals amplify. Alongside her, Best and Harris become something between thought partners and frenemies, refusing to be the LaTavia Roberson and LeToya Luckett of this play.

Phoenix Best, Holli’ Conway, and Ciara Alyse Harris in a scene from Macbeth in Stride written and performed by Whitney White, directed by Taibi Magar and Tyler Dobrowsky, choreographed by Raja Feather Kelly. Yale Repertory Theatre, December 5-14, 2024. Photo © Joan Marcus.

That White and the witches are all Black women adds necessary depth to this reclamation, without ever having to name it. When Shakespeare wrote Macbeth in the early 17th century, neither women nor people of color were able to perform in his plays. To the contrary, Britain was well on its way to becoming the most active participant in the transatlantic slave trade, a title it held onto until the first half of the eighteenth century. (Not that the U.S. was any better: the first public performance of the show came only five years before the first recorded arrival of enslaved Africans in Virginia).

Shakespeare’s language might be for everyone—New Haven’s most compelling performances have come from public high schools and anti gun violence groups—but it wasn’t written with everyone in mind. In the year 2024, maybe it shouldn’t be inherently subversive for a Black girl raised on the South Side of Chicago to step into this role and make it entirely her own.

But White still lives in a country that was built by stolen people on stolen land, that just elected a white supremacist who gets his kicks from making women feel small and afraid and not in control of their futures. She is writing for the world that is, not the world that could be, and the questions she asks are well worth it. 

“All The World Should Be Welcomed To The Stage”

Whitney White at New Haven Adult & Continuing Ed Tuesday morning. Lucy Gellman Photo.

Part of that is the genesis of the show itself. On Tuesday morning, White and Duncan discussed the journey that led them to the Rep’s York Street stage, priming an audience at New Haven Adult & Continuing Education for the performance they would see on Thursday.

By the time they left, both had not just demystified Shakespeare, but stressed that theater is and has always been for everyone—no matter how many barriers there seem to be between a person and a performance. It’s why she puts Sizza, Tina Turner, David Bowie, Ricky Dillard and Robert Glasper right there beside Elizabethan language. 

"When you go to the theater, you feel like this—" White pulled her shoulders up until they were nearly touching her cheeks. "You feel like, 'That's not a space for me ... they don't want me and my kind in this building.' And yet Shakespeare is very much for everybody."

"If all the world's a stage, then all the world should be welcomed to the stage,” she added “And I started making these shows evaluating power and contemporary issues through his plays and through music."

Born and raised by a single mom in Chicago, White “grew up in a very communal environment,” where music became part of her foundation and her door to the theater. What she loved—and still loves—was how quickly and profoundly music could communicate, including across languages and cultural barriers. 

Barbara "Muzikaldunk" Duncan with Hannah Gellman and Amy Boratko at Adult Ed. Lucy Gellman Photos.

At the same time, she was also part of a family of Black women, many of whom died way before their time. When she started reading Shakespeare more closely as a young adult, it often led her back to these women she loved so deeply. In his women, she could see and feel the dreams deferred, the constant striving, the ways the world pushed back against them and ground them down because of who they were.

“I always like to say, I don’t feel I’m the best and most beautiful of my family,” she said. “There were a lot of other women in my family who had ideas and passions and wanted to stay in school and wanted to do all these things, and they didn’t make it there. And their lives, to me, were cut way too short, as Shakespeare would say.”

“If you’re too loud, then you’re that,” she added. “If you’re too this, then you’re that. If you’re too Black, you’re that. And the world has many ways of syphoning us away from what we want to be. And so the piece is looking at that. Like, maybe we’re not the problem. Maybe there’s another problem.”

Macbeth In Stride is an answer to that, she said. When she revisited the play in graduate school—White studied at Brown University, where an early run of the show took place in 2015— she could see her mom, her aunts, her cousins in Lady Macbeth. The first versions of the show included covers of Ike and Tina Turner (she idolizes Turner, who is also an inspiration for this show) and the Doors.

Connie Beaman: "I felt that, I know I can make it. I can make it.”

After graduating, she committed to performing it once a year, in locations that ranged from a barn in Vermont to the American Repertory Theatre. During that time, the show kept evolving (it is still evolving, she said—this production happens to be her favorite): White replaced covers with original music, with influences from rock to gospel to opera.

She added the witches and a Macbeth character. She folded in opportunities for audience participation, including a moment where a volunteer breaks down the plot (Thursday, it was Metro Business Academy’s Atlas Salter, who last year crushed it as Puck in an abridged Midsummer). She had friends read and re-read and edit the work, asking them for feedback along the way. 

“I wanted a play that looked and sounded the way I felt about the text,” she said (White also continued teaching, directing, writing and working in community during that time, including directing the premiere of Jaja’s African Hair Braiding on Broadway). At its best, she added, she thinks of the play as an old-school hip hop mixtape, in which Shakespeare is but one sample.

That resonated for Connie Beaman, a student and poet who moved to New Haven in 2008, and before Thursday had never attended a play. Tuesday, she was one of the first to raise a hand when White asked who in the room had been to a church service (“Then you've seen a show!” White said). Two days later, she was glowing after the performance.

“It was very educational, and it was all about life to me,” she said. “And the challenges that people have in their life. I felt that, I know I can make it. I can make it.”

Milane Williams, who after Thursday's performance said she was going to come back to the show with her grandmother. 

White also encouraged attendees to stick with whatever they are most passionate about, whether it is writing or theatre or something completely different. Student Milane Williams perked up as she listened.

“When you thought about giving up, what kept you going?” Williams asked. After Thursday's performance, she said that the message had resonated so deeply that she planned to return with her grandmother. 

White recalled nights with her mom in a one-room apartment on the South Side of Chicago. Her mom did everything to make sure that White could achieve whatever she wanted.

“We all deserve to be in the spaces we want to be in,” she said. “And it’s very easy for people to make you feel like you don’t need to be there, or you shouldn’t be there. You know? And whenever someone makes me feel like that, I’m like, I need to be here. Let me spread all the way out and be right here.”