Q&A with Mare Trevathan, Anne Penner, and Hadley Kamminga-Peck
The Lady M Project was co-conceived by Anne Penner and Mare Trevathan, co-written by Hadley Kamminga-Peck, Anne Penner, and Mare Trevathan, and directed by Mare Trevathan.
Q: Could each of you introduce yourselves and your roles in The Lady M Project?
Anne Penner (she/her/hers): Hi, my name is Anne Penner and I’m one of three writers on The Lady M Project, and I am also playing Lady M.
Hadley Kamminga-Peck (she/her/hers): Hi, I'm Hadley Kamminga-Peck. I'm one of the three writers on The Lady M Project and I play Senga.
Mare Trevathan: I am Mare Trevathan, she/her/hers pronouns, and I am the third of the three writers on The Lady M Project, and I will be directing the upcoming Local Lab workshop.
Q: Anne & Mare, you conceived The Lady M Project together. What sparked the idea?
AP: Yeah, I'll start. So, many people–not just me–sometimes wish that the women in Shakespeare’s plays got more stage time, or at least that we heard their perspective of the given circumstances of the story more than we get to. Lady M, Lady Macbeth, was one of those for me. So, in November of I think 2019–Mare it's been over two years–I said, “Mare! I have this idea: I want to take all of the Lady Macbeth scenes in Macbeth, and I want us to explore them and I don't really know what that means, I want her to be more front and center than Macbeth and some of the other characters.” I don't know where we were going with this, but Mare said “sure,” and we took it from there, and then Hadley joined us less than a year after that.
MT: Yeah, so we literally started, you know, pre-pandemic, in Anne’s kitchen, with all of the Shakespeare scenes that included Lady M in them and looked for the through-line of her character, and also what was truly on the page versus what we know of Lady M through hundreds of years of production history that gets embedded into what we think we know about her character, as well. Anne and I were doing research along the way, and I came across somebody’s dissertation online that really got into Lady M and gave a more feminist viewpoint about Lady M, and it was purely coincidental that that dissertation–when I went looking for who the author was to ask their permission to cite it–that it was Hadley. That was her dissertation, and Anna and I had both collaborated with her at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival over the years, so it was a really delightful coincidence.
Q: What was the writing process like? When Hadley was brought in as a co-writer, how did that collaboration play out?
AP: I'm gonna jump in and I’m going to crudely break it into three parts. So, there was first Mare and me, and then there were a few months where Hadley joined, maybe late summer of 2020, and so we had a few months with Hadley to manipulate the script for December 2020, and then, of course, this past year, plus. So, for Act I of this we created fun compositions–I would call them compositions and Mare would call them recipes–they come from the world of viewpoints, where we would take the text of a Lady Macbeth script and then create a bunch of ingredients. It has to include contrast, and it has to include lots of loud noise, and we just kind of played around with these. What I was struggling with was I was really honoring the original Shakespeare too much. So, by the time we had a very casual reading in the fall of 2020, where I think the actors and I are thinking, this is too much like Shakespeare's Macbeth. It's not different enough. And so, with Hadley's help and with the actors–we've had actors we've been working with from the start–we've been really able to very violently or assertively open up the script and really create something that feels much more original than what that first iteration was.
MT: Hadley, do you want to talk a little bit about the process of writing together online?
HKP: Google Docs is our best friend, I think. Not to not to advertise for Google, Lord knows they don't need it. But we jumped on a Zoom and all three of us worked in the same document and we read it aloud a lot, and sometimes we read the same roles and sometimes we mixed it up and everybody popcorns around and reads whatever role you feel like so we get different voices reading the lines and different energies approaching the the characters in different ways. And then, sometimes we break apart and will, you know, say, okay, I'm going to work on this for 15 minutes, you work on that for 15 minutes, Mare will set a timer on her phone, and then we come back together and read what we've worked on. I found it to be a wonderful collaboration in terms of being right there with each other in the moment, being able to listen and work through things together, as a group, but also to break off and give ourselves little tasks that we can do individually and then come back together and share what we've done.
MT: I think this is a quintessential example of how Local Theater Company can work with that idea of locals being anywhere, that theater makes its own local community. Hadley is not in Colorado and Anne and I are, and we've been blessed to do these Zoom readings with actors who are scattered across the country, who, you know, we would have never been able to afford the finances or time for everybody to come together throughout this development process of a couple of years, nor, frankly, would we have taken a couple of years in order to do it under sort of the old model, as theater has to go with these tight timelines outside of a pandemic. There's been a lot of blessings throughout this process, and, boy, are we grateful and eager to all be in the same room this March.
Q: I would love to hear from each of you–especially Hadley, if you want to touch on your dissertation and your motivation behind it–but why the character and story of Lady Macbeth is striking and important, and what makes this Shakespearean character and the Shakespearean story relevant today, and/or why it's important to challenge the Shakespeare text in new and modern ways?
HKP: Do you mind if I start?
AP: Yeah, go for it.
MT: This is your dissertation right there, right?
HKP: Oh my God, there's so many things to talk about, so please shut me up at some point. So, my dissertation discussed female characters throughout Elizabethan drama in the context of Queen Elizabeth on the throne, and kind of said there's no way that these women would be relegated to these very simplistic versions of women when we have this amazing, powerful ruler on the throne running England. I used a political theory that she had us to embrace her ability to rule and applied it to female characters, like Lady Macbeth, and in doing so I really discovered that these characters are so much richer and so much more vibrant than we usually give them credit for being. They have a lot more autonomy, they have a lot more agency, and they are not so simplistically defined.
Lady M is definitely a character, you know, she gets that epithet at the end of the play of the fiend-like queen from Malcolm and that's kind of how she gets treated throughout production history. She's treated as this vicious creature, she's a witch, she pushes Macbeth to do it, it's all her fault, she's violent, she probably killed her own child, like there's all these horrible things that people believe about her and I just don't think any of that is true. I think she's a woman in a really tough situation. I think she has a very strong relationship with her partner, and the two of them want the best for themselves and for their country and they do what they see is best.
In terms of why it's still relevant today, I mean, Hillary Clinton was called Lady Macbeth. She got called that in the newspapers. Just, oh God, it wasn't even that long ago, it was like 2010, the Prime Minister of Australia was accused of being Lady Macbeth. It's definitely a term that we identify with powerful women today, and so I think it's worthwhile to go back and reexamine who this woman actually was and was she as horrible as people would like to make her out to be, or is there something else to her, is there more to her past? What's her motivation? What are all the different elements of her that reflect the actual person? And one of the things that I've really enjoyed doing in this process is researching the historical women and researching more of historical women in Scotland, witchcraft in Scotland, and all of these elements of history that we can bring up and make contemporary and show how they are actually very relevant to today.
MT: The New York Times just published an article last Saturday that Anne brought to our attention, which is about female antiheroes on TV and how there is a shift in culture to accept a little bit more of what we think of we've categorized as “not feminine” and tolerating that in TV, but there persists this resistance to women as the antihero. There's a long tradition of men being the antihero, and we still find them compelling, appealing, charismatic, even attractive, and there's certainly a gender gap there in the way public perception treats the female antihero.
AP: Yeah, we want to explore, you know, the box in which she historically has been put in and and, to some extent–it is evidenced in the script–where it's just very black and white, that she's a bad guy, right? She's a bad, evil woman, and we thought, well, what if–God forbid–what if she weren't, or what if she was partly that and partly not? What if it was much more nuanced? What if she actually enjoyed the badness, right, to some extent? We’re just trying to complicate this perception of her. Yeah, that article is fascinating, [it’s interesting] that that marriage is referenced and that it was written by two CU Denver English professors who have a book on this. And another thing–which doesn't have to do so much with Lady Macbeth so forgive me–but they talk about Somebody, Somewhere, which is this new HBO Max show with Bridget Everett, but so just like the antihero in the sense of, like, does someone have to be ambitious as the protagonist of a story? I feel like Lady M of course is, to some extent.
Q: I would love to hear, without giving too much away, the biggest strides and changes from the previous version of The Lady M Project that was presented in 2020? How has Local, as a new play incubator, created room for growth and change of this story?
AP: Can I jump in? There's a lot, I have like three things I want to say, and we have to make sure we don't share too much. I'm so grateful to Local for helping us support both the December 2020 one and now this in-person one. I also found that some of the people, Pesha and Nick in particular, with that first iteration, were really there for us in terms of sharing ideas and hearing our ideas and kind of mapping out. They’re really just supporting the writing process and helping us improve the writing without being oppressive, without being instructive, or, you know, paternalistic in any way.
I also want to speak to the actors. Since the end of December, we had five actors–three of them are still with us–and I'm happy to name them if that would be helpful, but they were essential. They were amazing collaborators, and they've been really essential in helping us figure out the rules of this play and how we need to sort of set up the rules so the audience knows how to watch this play. And then, once we set up the guardrails, we can break the guardrails, we can break the rules, but the audience needs help figuring out how to watch this play–the story–progress. The one big change I’ll say without, I think, spoiling too much is–
HKP: I think we can say we’ve added a third act, there's a lot less reverence to the original text, a lot more of our own words on the page, and I would say also that the actors and Local have been really instrumental in helping us be brave enough to be irreverent with the text and to push against it more, to set up the rules and break the rules, as Anne said. I think we've managed to embrace that stuff more in this new iteration.
MT: I think an element, the critical element, of that is having more liberty at whose story gets told, and, I mean, obviously Lady Macbeth being the primary one there, but whose else’s story, you know? We have some characters that are unnamed in Shakespeare that appear as named, more complex humans in our version, and that's been a fun ride, too.
Q: What would you like audiences to take away from The Lady M Project?
MT: I would love for audiences to walk away with a filter that they can carry around in the world, and as they look at the art that they consume, the media that they consume, to question what's comprising that filter. I think that we're all in a moment of societal shifting where we're starting to see where some of those filters have been–personal, societal–and I think this is an opportunity to, the next time somebody looks not just at Shakespeare, but even as we were talking about before with contemporary TV, what is it that's in place that is affecting how a character is being portrayed and seen.
HKP: Yeah, I think mine is very similar to Mare’s. I would love for people to walk away asking themselves, just because a woman has always been portrayed this way or characters have always been portrayed this way, is that really who she is? Is that really all there is to her, and to ask themselves why is she being portrayed that way, but also, what more lies behind all of that within the character? For all of these characters, we went through a phase where we simplified them a lot, and we like to simplify characters, and I think we're leaning into a place now where we love the complexity and the nuances, as Anne said, and so I hope audiences walk away enjoying that complexity and the nuance that we've brought to Lady M, whether or not they agree with it.
AP: I would love for the audience to walk away realizing that they can be narrators of their own lives, that we took a very traditional play that's existed for 400 plus years and we went topsy turvy with it–we opened it up and unpacked it, in particular Lady Macbeth, and we created our own story of her–and that people can do that as creators or writers or theatermakers, but they also have the power to do that with their own lives and their sort of perception of their role inside of their own life.
