If an actor is fated to lose his head on stage, neck flexibility helps.
“We need to make sure there’s good dexterity in the folks whose head is being removed,” said fight director Sean Michael Bradley, who is choreographing on-stage decapitations for Quintessence Theatre Company’s production of “Macbeth” March 14 through April 21.
“If they can put their chin to their chest in as deep as possible, it’s making sure it’s the proper angle,” he said. “Then the majority of the audience is not going to see behind the veil of the magic trick.”
Bradley’s head-chopping expertise will come in handy because director Alex Burns has promised a particularly bloody version of Shakespeare’s indictment of power and ambition.
“It should feel like a horror story,” said Burns, who is also Quintessence’s artistic director. “There are dark supernatural moments. There are body parts being pulled out of witches’ cauldrons. There are heads being cut up. Covered in blood – six different characters are described that way in the script.”
Much of the horror in “Macbeth” is psychological.
“It digs deep into the dark space of human ambition,” Burns said, who is staging an all-male production. Macbeth and his wife, Lady Macbeth, advocate or use violence to achieve power. Each then must cope with the psychological ramifications of its use.
“They are always questioning: Is this madness? Is this supernatural? Is this real or am I the one on the outside of reality?” Burns said. “Then add to that the reality of blood and death. It’s haunting on a level that few plays are able to tap.”
“Who is complicit and who is in charge? It’s definitely fascinating to unpack,” Burns said, drawing connections between the unraveling of morality in the pursuit of power in the play and in today’s political situation.
“Shakespeare doesn’t allow us to make [Lady Macbeth] an innocent in any way. The collapse of her mind and her guilt shows she is fully aware of what she has done. She clearly chooses to enter a dark, duplicitous, and murderous space.
“We all make choices to make things happen,” Burns said. Sometimes, he said, we consider the repercussions, but just as often we try to forget about them.
“I think there is villainy in all of us.”
Blood too, obviously.
“We are working with a blood team who will create blood that looks like blood and has the kind of viscous nature of blood,” Burns said, “and most important can be washed out, so at the end of the night you can throw [costumes] in the washer, and you can’t see any color which is ultimately the challenge of blood.”
The beheadings have their own demands. Besides tapping into Bradley’s expertise, Quintessence has hired make-up artist Gianna Zulli to make casts from the heads of the actors who will be decapitated.
“You have to get the choreography into place,” said Bradley, who has a martial arts background. “You have to believably hide in the set design the head of the real actor, because that’s not going to leave his shoulders.
“It’s a bait-and-switch,” he said. “You hide the actor’s real head. There’s a chopping motion. Then the fake head gets grabbed close enough to where the real head is so that it’s believable.
“All fight choreography is a dance [designed] to convey violence,” said Bradley. “It’s a partner dance with timing between the people involved in it. It’s really working on the believability of the chopping motions.”
“For years, I’ve lived in this imaginative world of imagining, how to make something as gross and disturbing as possible so it’s effective in the narrative,” said Bradley, a University of the Arts graduate whose credits include both acting and fight choreography on stage, television, and film here and in New York, where he now lives.
“For the actors, it can be hard,” he said. “You have to work on compartmentalizing – the character motivation, their drive, and their actions, while keeping all of our friends and partners safe as we are trying to convey the illusion of violent activities.
“There’s difficulty tapping into the primal part of that,” he said. “It is something you get better at with practice. You have to have poise and control, while also at times conveying that the character is out of control.
“It can be a tightrope.”
“Macbeth,” March 14-April 21, Quintessence Theatre Co., Sedgwick Theater, 7137 Germantown Ave., Mt. Airy, Phila. 215-987-4450. Pay-what-you-can tickets are available during Philly Theatre Week, April 4-14, by booking through Theatre Philadelphia at theatrephiladelphia.org.
