By MICHAEL ANDEREGG
“Shakespeare Comes to Harlem” announced a lead story in the New York Times on August 10, 2021. Somewhat misleadingly, as it turns out. The reference was to a production of The Merry Wives of Windsor playing at the newly reopened Delacorte Theater in Central Park, not Harlem, though it was set in the largely west-African neighborhood around 116th St. in south Harlem. Perhaps “Harlem Comes to Shakespeare” would have been more apropos. Still, it’s a catchy phrase, as it would have been eighty-five years earlier, in April 1936, when the Federal Negro Theatre’s production of Macbeth, directed by a twenty year old Orson Welles and featuring a cast of African American performers, opened at Harlem’s Lafayette Theatre.
Although the Times writer does not seem to have been directly referring to what would come to be known as the “Voodoo” Macbeth, a memory of that production very likely lies behind the headline choice. Someone might have noticed that 2021 had already seen two “homages” to that famous Macbeth, one on BBC’s Radio Sounds broadcast on January 28 and the other a film produced under the auspices of the University of Southern California film studies program and released in May at the Harlem International Film Festival. Both were called Voodoo Macbeth, and both attempted to recreate the personalities and actions leading to and including the triumphant opening of the Harlem production. And although they can hardly have influenced each other, they each present a similar, and at times similarly distorted, take on their subject.
Sharon Oakes’s script for the 45-minute BBC radio drama and the screenplay for the nearly two hour movie credited to eight writers both draw on the same Orson Welles biographies and published accounts of the Harlem Macbeth. The audio play, though marred with a number of mostly minor errors — for one instance, Jack Carter, the African American actor who played Macbeth, did not play Crown in Porgy and Bess, but in the non-musical play that preceded it, Porgy — sticks, for the most part, to the known facts and familiar legends, repeating well-worn stories like the one of the fatal voodoo hex that supposedly caused the demise of critic Percy Hammond. The USC film, which has more than twice the time of the radio program to present its narrative, has greater opportunity to distort or ignore the known facts. The political context, for instance, is an odd mix of fact and fiction. This is particularly true of everything having to do with Martin Dies, the historical figure who would become notorious as a virulent member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), of which he was the first chair. In the film, he attends an early Macbeth rehearsal and finds that “voodoo is too subversive,” but he then shows up on opening night. This is nonsense, and projects backwards from the 1938 HUAC hearings where the Dies committee distinguished itself by suggesting that Christopher Marlowe might well be a communist.
Both the radio drama and the film focus on Jack Carter, the volatile star of the Harlem Macbeth, and in each Carter is constructed from at times contradictory information in the sources. In the radio play, he is described by John Houseman as “notoriously unreliable,” but he is at the same time presented as the only possible choice for the production’s starring role: after reciting one line from the play at his audition, Welles tells him, “You are Macbeth.” Carter’s problem with alcohol, factually based, receives particular emphasis in the BBC version, which has him showing up drunk soon after the play opens and being unable to remember his lines, at which point Welles prepares to black up and go on in his place, an impulse strongly vetoed by the production’s Lady Macbeth, Edna Thomas. This conflates two later events: Carter refusing to go on after the first act near the end of the production’s later brief run at the Adelphi Theater downtown — perhaps because of drink, perhaps not — and being replaced by Maurice Ellis, and the even later event, when the production went on tour, of Welles replacing an ailing Ellis for one performance in Indianapolis. The Voodoo Macbeth film provides its own version of Carter’s alcohol-infused breakdown: removed from the production even before the Harlem opening, he shows up the first night intoxicated and interfering with the action on stage.
The BBC Voodoo Macbeth stresses the conflicts among the various members of the Macbeth cast and crew. We hear Orson chewing out black actors and stagehands for “caterwauling,” which leads to Edna Thomas telling him that the people he insults will “take your head off,” a moment Thomas herself remembered many years later. Welles and his producing partner John Houseman constantly bicker: stung by a newspaper report describing Macbeth as “a production by John Houseman and Orson Welles,” Orson is, inevitably, enraged, taunting Houseman with “once a grain merchant, always a grain merchant.” A major focus of Oakes’s script is the relationship between Welles and Jack Carter, who are presented as best buddies one moment and butting heads the next. An invented, extremely unlikely episode has Orson going with Jack to the Waldorf Hotel for drinks and a meal; after a waiter refuses to seat them in the main room, they are thrown out. Carter is depicted as reacting angrily to the Macbeth reviews, especially Brooks Atkinson’s in the New York Times which takes more interest in Carter’s anatomy than in his acting abilities; though there is no evidence of Carter’s reaction to newspaper comments, his anger would not have been surprising. Carter is also shown as upset at Orson for planning to leave the Negro Theater after Macbeth opens. In truth, Welles stayed with the production to the end, though he did move on soon thereafter.
The film Voodoo Macbeth could almost be seen as an expansion of the BBC production, with similar narrative emphases as well as similar imaginative reconstructions of the known historical record. Although ostensibly a student project employing eight writers and ten directors, the film cast actors with various degrees of experience in leading roles and its recreation of 1930s Harlem through setting, costumes, and décor is, for the most part, impressive, suggesting the presence of creative talent and reasonable funding. Clearly, this is not precisely a “student film” but more of an independent production involving the input of some, mostly former, USC students, and backed by a grant from Warner Brothers on whose standing “New York” sets the production was filmed. Disappointingly, the filmmakers make no attempt, apart from a few incidental moments, to recreate the staging or the look of the original Harlem production, although this would not have taken extraordinary effort or cost. Welles’s transformation of Shakespeare’s banquet scene into a fancy dress ball is understandably ignored (too many actors in too many costumes would have been needed), but it would not have been difficult to design a castle set that at least resembles the original—there is plenty of visual evidence in the still photographs and four minutes of film shown here alongside the end credits. Only the platform on which Macbeth and Macduff fight to the death is roughly similar to the one in the Harlem staging.
Unfortunately, even more than in the BBC radio play, errors of fact and distortions of actual events occur throughout. Welles, for example, could not have made a slighting reference to the Royal Shakespeare Company, which was not founded until 1961. He did not play Romeo (“the boldest and best I’ve seen,” says “Houseman”) in Romeo and Juliet, but he did play Mercutio on tour and Tybalt and the Chorus in New York. No other production of Macbeth was appearing in Manhattan in 1936 (Orson: “Do you know how many productions of the Scottish play are running in Manhattan as we speak?”), and newspaper reviewer Percy Hammond did not attend a preview of Macbeth nor was he given money by HUAC’s Martin Dies to write a negative notice, something the actual Percy Hammond had no trouble doing on his own. Juano Hernandez, the actor Welles had originally chosen to play Macbeth, born in Puerto Rico, is in the film deported by immigration early on and disappears from the production. In fact, Hernandez asked to be replaced because he had been offered work on a continuing radio series; the filmmakers, at least, have enough self-awareness to raise the question of how a native of Puerto Rico, an American citizen, can be deported.
The filmmakers apparently wanted to present the Harlem Macbeth project, at least in part, from the point of view of the African Americans involved, a potentially valuable and welcome intervention which, to a lesser extent, also seems to have inspired the BBC broadcast. What we are given, instead, is a curious diminishment of the historical Black figures the film pretends to honor. Jack Carter is barely acknowledged as the successful performer he was. Though his long run as Crown in Porgy gets a passing mention, nothing is said of his starring role in the important play, Stevedore, two years earlier. Carter’s drinking problem, for which there is, admittedly, convincing evidence, here takes precedence over everything else about him. Other performers of color are given mostly invented lives. Edna Thomas, who played Lady Macbeth, was an experienced actor (she, too, was in Stevedore) and a Harlem activist; she was on the play reading committee for the Harlem Negro Theatre and was involved in developing “Living Newspaper” productions by the New York Dramatists Laboratory. In the film, she is a young singer with no previous acting experience. The Welles character, at one point, tries to date her, and he initially casts her as Lady Macduff, presumably as a prelude to his attempted seduction. Welles was not inspired by an imaginary street musician to include drums as a significant part of the Harlem production; here again, far from celebrating known Black artists, the film fails to acknowledge the contributions of African musicians Asadata Dafora (Sierra Leone) and Abdul Assen (Nigeria), and others, to the success of “Voodoo” Macbeth.
The film also introduces a fictional character, “Cuba,” in order to inject a poorly constructed gay subplot, to which too much time is devoted, and which is not clearly relevant to anything else in the film. Cuba is obviously meant to stand in for Canada Lee, since he plays Banquo, Lee’s role in Macbeth, and since he is, as the real Lee was, a boxer. As Cuba’s lover is called Maurice and initially plays Macduff, later promoted to Macbeth in the film, he is clearly meant to be Maurice Ellis, who however, would not be cast as Macbeth until the later Adelphi Theatre run. Why we have the fictional “Cuba” standing in for Lee, who is not known to be have been gay, in a relationship with the historical Maurice, of whose private life little is known, is a mystery. This does, however, set up a tasteless joke: Welles tells Maurice, who wants to go on as Macbeth for the inebriated Jack Carter: “I can’t send in a queen for a king.”
The only Black character who is given something close to a recognition of her significance in the theater world of the 1930s is the one based on Rose McClendon. The actual McClendon was chosen by Federal Theater Project director Hallie Flannagan to head the Negro Unit, but she soon realized that a diagnosis of cancer would make it impossible to carry out that responsibly on her own and she suggested that a white director, John Houseman, with whom she had worked before, be brought aboard as joint head. She did not have to be introduced to Welles, as the film pretends, since she had been with him in the cast of Panic the previous year. There is no evidence that she chose the Macbeth project herself, and, as far as we know, she never rehearsed as Lady Macbeth, as she does here, though Welles had hoped to cast her in the role. Several strategic coughing moments at various points in the film tell us that she is seriously ill. She says she is suffering from pleurisy, something she wishes to keep secret; a written “what happened afterwards” summary at the conclusion of the film states that she died of pneumonia; there is no mention of cancer.
The portrait the film gives us of Orson Welles is, at one level, predictable: everyone, it would seem, enjoys diminishing him as a human being while honoring, to a greater or lesser extent, his accomplishments (or not honoring them — see, e.g., Mank). There is little point in attempting to absolve him of the various charges and false information the film retails. But it is worth at least clearing up some facts.
For one thing, he did not read advertising copy on his radio appearances in the early 1930s — that would come much later. He did not suggest that he should himself play Macbeth in blackface, and he certainly did not do so at a public preview of the Harlem production — shades, again, of the one night stand in Indianapolis. He was egotistical, he could drink to excess (though not, as far as we know, when he was at work), but he was not, as the film implies, entirely oblivious of the feelings of others. The conflict between Orson and his wife, Virginia, over her career needs is based on very little. She was not hired, and then fired, as producer. She did, according to both Welles and Houseman, come up with the idea of creating a voodoo context for Macbeth and she was involved in various ways throughout the rehearsal period. In the end, and predictably, this Voodoo Macbeth is a redemption story: after being clueless for three quarters of the film, Welles, with the help of Rose, turns himself around, and works with his cast to “make Rose’s dream come true.”
Orson Welles’s role in the creation of the “Voodoo” Macbeth has over the years been a matter of debate, and Welles has at different times been given both too much and too little credit for the production’s effect and impact. Commentators have overlooked or underplayed, as he himself did, the contributions of important members of his production unit and, more generally, the whole superstructure of the Negro Theater, without which the success of Macbeth would not have been possible. Various accounts of the Harlem production emphasize Welles’s irresponsibility, unorthodox working habits, temper tantrums, and at times childish behavior. But Welles is almost as likely to be given too little credit by an unwillingness to recognize his whole-hearted commitment to a project that could easily have come to naught without his continuous support, including financial. The challenges presented by the Macbeth project were enormous: the large number (150 or more) of actors, musicians, and supernumeraries whose activities had to be coordinated on the Harlem stage; resistance within and without from a variety of political forces from Black intellectuals, the Communist party, and agitators for social justice on the one hand; and bureaucrats, racist politicians, New Deal haters, and other parts of the white establishment, on the other. The BBC radio play and the USC film touch on a number of these issues, but neither is able to reconcile the complexities and contradictions into a fully satisfactory, coherent drama, one that gives recognition both to the richness of the African American contribution and to the talent and dedication Orson Welles brought to presenting Shakespeare’s Macbeth in Harlem.
(Michael Anderegg is professor emeritus of English at the University of North Dakota. His books include Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture and Cinematic Shakespeare.)
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