Shakespeare in the park gallerySeveral times this summer, some friends and I have attended outdoor performances of Shakespeare produced by the Upstate Shakespeare Festival and staged in Greenville’s Falls Park.

In early June, Anna Beth, Kellen, Melissa, Jon, Abby, and I saw Macbeth. The acting wasn’t consistently good, but the lead roles were well-performed. After the play, we got ice cream and wandered around the park together.

This production of Macbeth took a different interpretation than I’ve seen before. I have usually considered the play’s driving force to be Macbeth’s “vaulting ambition.” In other words, Macbeth destroys himself with his ambition and the witches’ prophecies serve only as a “spur to prick the sides of [his] intent.” In the production we saw, the witches were never absent from the stage. If they were not the characters speaking at the time, they were at least watching the action. Sometimes the witches were making incantations or controlling the main actors on stage. For example, the three witches were obviously possessing Lady Macbeth during her soliloquy in which she invokes the “spirits that tend on mortal thoughts” to “fill [her] from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty” in preparation for murdering Duncan. The witches also doubled as minor characters who helped fulfill the prophesies. For example, the three witches were also the three murderers of Banquo. In one way or another, they were always controlling the action. Though I think most of that interpretation was imported into the text and that there is much more textual warrant for attributing Macbeth’s downfall to his own ambition, the production’s emphasis on the demonic was a different perspective.

In late July, Anna Beth, Kellen, Abby, and I returned for another play—this time Love’s Labour’s Lost. The production was not nearly as good as that of Macbeth, and some of the actors were incomprehensible. Since we had all seen Love’s Labour’s Lost produced as the summer play at BJU, we decided to leave the play midway through and produce our own entertainment. We wandered through the park a bit, avoided a rather noisy concert, and found a nice spot by the Reedy River. We played games, talked, took photos of the bridge and of one another, and called it a night.

Going to the park and watching Shakespeare (or not watching Shakespeare) is surely a pleasant way to spend a summer’s evening, provided one is in good company.