#dramaturge ayanna thompson

[foxsoulcourt]

From VOGUE 23 March 2022

[shakespearenews]

“I told Sam: I don’t work on color­blind productions,” says Shakespeare scholar Ayanna Thompson, who served as a somewhat unusually hands-on dramaturge. Macbeth, the scholar points out, is the “Blackest play that people don’t think is about race,” both in its language (“black Macbeth”) and its performance history: There was the early-19th-century Black actor sensation Ira Aldridge, who portrayed the doomed Scottish warrior in whiteface, and Orson Welles’s Haitian-inflected “Voodoo Macbeth,” staged with the Federal Theatre Project’s Negro Unit in Harlem in 1936, a production estimated to have drawn a crowd of 10,000 to its opening night. 

As part of the workshop, Thompson spent time with Negga and Craig before the rest of the cast was brought in, during which, she says, she was able to ask the former Bond questions like: “Have you thought about how your whiteness plays?” In other words, as she puts it, it wasn’t just a conversation for the actors of color. “We’re not ignoring it,” says Craig, “neither are we making a huge statement about it—that would be wrong as well.”