nytimes.com

Review: Girls Just Wanna Play 'Mac Beth'

May 20th, 2019

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Candy jewelry. Some baby dolls. A stash of tampons. In the world of adolescent girls, items like these are ordinary features of the landscape. And so they are in Erica Schmidt’s bloody “Mac Beth,” an adaptation of the Shakespeare play that with its all-female cast becomes a raucous, sometimes impish, very dark-edged revel.

 

 

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timeout.com

Review: Mac Beth

May 20th, 2019

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Equally giggly and grisly, Erica Schmidt's unnerving adaptation of Macbeth for Red Bull Theater features seven young actresses performing Shakespeare's tragedy as uniform-clad schoolgirls in an abandoned lot. The language is mostly the Shakespeare’s, albeit pared down to one whirlwind act. The sensibility, however, is decidedly contemporary, as these hyperactive drama queens get lost in a gruesome fantasy world that casts some of them as villains and others as victims.

 

 

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theatermania.com

An Afterschool Study Group Brushes Up on Ambition and Murder in Mac Beth

May 19th, 2019

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There's a mystical connection between the grisly paranormal and teenage girls. Just look at Bloody Mary or the Slender Man. Is there any doubt that if Abigail Williams of The Crucible were a teenage girl in 2019, she would have some dark fascination with the Momo Challenge? So writer-director Erica Schmidt is onto something when she reimagines Shakespeare's most supernatural tragedy as an afterschool group of private school girls studying Macbeth.