Megan Gogerty’s Lady MacBeth and Her Pal Megan: Fun at the Fringe

The Fringe Festival is Pop Up Theater that appears every June in our town.  It occurs in what used to be a fringe neighborhood, Over the Rhine, a ghetto for the southern Catholic German Immigrants who crowded into our town in the 1800s and lived in tenements and rowhouses until they made their way up the social ladder and moved out to better parts of town, leaving the crumbling buildings behind for the poor – mostly African Americans – to create a ghetto of despair in the shadow of the skyscrapers of downtown.  More recently, gentrifiers have realized that this is prime real estate within walking distance of many of the highest paid jobs in town, and expensive new condominium buildings sit cheek by jowl with boarded up buildings, buildings with tenants barely hanging on and rehabbed row houses with beautiful new windows and doors.

We parked our car in a garage that is all but hermetically sealed, and took our ticket as we would need that to re-enter the secure seeming structure to walk a couple of blocks to the site of this one hour play – an arts college classroom converted into a performance space for this one woman play.  Megan Gogerty, the playwright and star, played to a very appreciative audience of seventy five or so.  Rated PG-13, the audience leaned toward women, but included more men than just me – with older, middle-aged, hipsterish, and a smattering of young teens in attendance with their parents.  We were the reluctant wife, the daughter who is president of her college’s feminist club, and a friend who let us know that this was likely to be a good performance.

Megan Gogerty is, according to the bio, a comedian and faculty member at the University of Iowa’s Playwrights workshop and the title suggested that the play would be about Megan’s relationship with Lady MacBeth, which it was.  And like all things that are this specific, it was about much more.  It was also a wonderfully psychoanalytic play without ever once mentioning Freud because it was about the discovery of one's identity - one's character - through interactions with fantasy creations of the world and with very real other people.  The plot revolves around Gogerty’s reaction to her actress friend’s observation that Megan’s secret ambition to play Lady MacBeth is ridiculous – in part because she has never read MacBeth, but even more importantly because Megan’s character is not dark, evil, deep and sexual, but more akin to a Golden Retriever.  What follows is her construction of both Lady MacBeth and herself – and, in a weird and fitting twist of plot, her exoneration of Lady MacBeth, herself, Hillary Clinton and the feminist movement.  No matter how I portray it, I fear that my representation will feel dry and didactic – for that I apologize in advance.  Megan’s, of course, was funny – and poignant.

Lady MacBeth is one of Shakespeare’s few really good roles for women – and, as Gogerty pointed out – it is an almost invisible role with about a quarter the lines that Shakespeare reserves for MacBeth himself.  MacBeth promises Lady MacBeth that they will, when they have fulfilled the prophecy of the witches in the opening scene, be equal partners not just in the killing that gets him to the throne but in the governing that follows it (there are more than a few overtones of House of Cards here).  The promised sharing of power with a woman, of course, does not happen.  Lady MacBeth finds out about the post crowning machinations only after they have occurred and she is increasingly marginalized in the tragic end to the play, ultimately killing herself, something that, when MacBeth is told that she is dead, Gogerty intimates he knows how she has died – by her own hand.

Megan, the comedian, having discovered the tragic life of Lady MacBeth is now confronted with two dilemmas – how can she become the dark temptress – and how can she avoid the temptress's fate – to fall on her own sword.  This is a thinly veiled description, I believe, of Clinton’s dilemma.  How can she become the true partner in power – and how can she do that while pretending to have stayed home to cook pies for Chelsea.  Megan does not imagine herself as Clinton – at least not overtly – but chronicles her own – and here sordid is called for and sort of fits – trajectory as a comedian.  She makes a go of it first as a twenty five year old – and finds herself a woman in a man’s world.  She sticks with it because, when she kills, it is like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute… and discovering that you have wings!  She makes a go of it a second time – at thirty five or so – and finds herself a more cunning woman in a man’s world.

One of the delights of this play, by the way, is that multiple story lines are evolving simultaneously as this apparently ditzy but actually well-crafted comedic narrative unfolds.  There is something about being in the hands of a comic who knows her craft that there is a kind of hypnotic experience – the narrative unfolds – we are increasingly willing to follow her where she leads because she has repeatedly met our concern that she is going off the beam with a laugh that reinforces that we are on the same page.  At one point she tells the story of being invited to headline for one of the comic masters that we all would recognize.  She was – and this was another consistent thread in her tapestry – concerned more about what she would wear – as a woman she is constantly aware of being evaluated based on how she looks – and so she has to be brutally honest with herself about her looks as she works through the narrative to articulate who it is that she is – and to incorporate this into who she is – and so, in this case, her concern with what she will wear derails her from preparing for the moment on stage – and she bombs.  The comic takes her under his wing and advises her to get to know herself better because what a comic does is to expose themselves on stage.  Her response to his question about who she is – a person who has nice skin – exposes the need to look deeper – to look inside herself.

The failure to make use of her big moment causes both self-doubt but also a kind of doubling down on the self (and Lady MacBeth) exploration process.  She works to both emulate and find a different way out of the dilemma.  She discovers darkness within herself – darkness that she both owns and denies – as when she earlier states that she doesn’t have stage fright, but that she does occasionally experience stage concern.  And in this owning and denying of the selfsame thing she seems very real and immediate and human.  She then does the same thing with her sexuality – exploring it as she takes on a different persona.  And she walks us right up to the edge of the destructive capacity of owning her sexuality before reassuring us that this doesn’t occur (whether it did or not is irrelevant - for the arc of this particular narrative to work, it mustn't have).

Ultimately, she connects deeply enough with Lady MacBeth to be able to re-create her – giving her a first name – something Shakespeare neglected to do – and humanizing her.  But rather than identifying with her – rather than becoming her – she chooses a different identity.  She identifies with the witches in the play and works to deputize us, the audience, as auxiliary witches – who use our magic to rehabilitate the newly minted Colleen (or whatever Scottish name she gives her) MacBeth – not through comically killing (though she does some of that in her bits about Lady MacB) but through love.  In a parallel manner, her comedy is transformed – from the harsh masculine killing – the sin that our Lady MacBeth can’t wash off - into the laughter and inclusive playfulness of childhood. 

In one brief hour, Megan has, indeed, conjured magic.  She has transformed one of the truly bloody tragedies of Shakespeare into a comic feel good moment.  Along with that, she has managed to exonerate Hillary Clinton, clarifying that Hillary was trapped by role expectations that tragically doomed her to political suicide – because she was not able to function as herself.  But she does not leave us rolling in the mess, but instead offers hope that we, through living with integrity can achieve a positive outcome – when she returns to her friend who dismissed her wishes to play Lady MacBeth and announces that she is a witch.  Her friend totally agrees that she is a witch and could easily play the part.

This comic ending plays well in the moment.  Megan was met by an enthusiastic standing ovation.  But I fear that it does not acknowledge some of the difficulties in wending our way through an ambitious life in which many of our ambitions are realized.  We fail along the way – when tempted by the siren call of sexuality we are lured onto the rocks – we can get stuck in our dark nights of the soul – we portray ourselves on stage to escape objectification and invite that very same objectification simultaneously.  We need to laugh at all of this, and at ourselves.  We need to offer expiation and atonement.  But this won’t prevent our having done the deeds to begin with – nor in doing them again.  After a year of hearing Ta Nehisi Coates and James Cone – after reading Viet Than Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, after seeing a potential terrorist elected president, and because I deeply care about the world – it is hard not to be in a tragic mindset.  Even though Megan mirrors my own inner Golden Retriever – the hopeless optimist who sees lots of good in the world, a position that I have taken in these posts countless times – and despite this having been a great respite – I am increasingly feeling myself to have a tragic impression of the world.  I don’t think that we can achieve all that we would without cost – whether on the global stage or the ones we inhabit on the fringes of the world – in our own homes and local communities.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.   For a subject based index, link here.

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information.  I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...