INTERVIEW: Maria Dizzia’s Lady Macduff questions the honesty of ‘honest men’
Photo: Macbeth stars, from left, Phillip James Brannon, Bobbi MacKenzie and Maria Dizzia. Photo courtesy of Joan Marcus / Provided by Polk & Co. with permission.
Sam Gold’s unique interpretation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth continues through July 10 at the Longacre Theatre on Broadway. Throughout the two-hour tragedy, there are many narrative threads to watch, from Daniel Craig’s stirring portrayal of Macbeth to Ruth Negga’s powerful performance as Lady Macbeth. Maria Dizzia, who is currently appearing in The Staircase on HBO Max, has enlivened the character of Lady Macduff, offering a new take on this important role.
For Dizzia, who recently performed in the national tour of What the Constitution Means to Me, her inclusion in the Macbeth ensemble came to be because of her years-long friendship with Gold.
“Sam and I went to college together, so that’s really far back in time,” Dizzia said in a recent phone interview. “I think it was 2012 we worked on Uncle Vanya together at Soho Rep. with Annie Baker, and then I remember the day that he called me about Macbeth. My father passed away in 2019, and he called me on Oct. 22, which is my dad’s birthday, in 2021. … It felt really special that he had called on my father’s birthday because I had missed [my father] so much, and he was always so supportive of my work in the theater. He would have been so happy to know that Sam and I were collaborating again and on such an ambitious project.”
Dizzia counts herself as a fan of Gold’s Shakespeare interpretations over the years. She appreciated his Othello at the New York Theatre Workshop (starring Craig and David Oyelowo), and his Hamlet at the Public Theater (with Oscar Isaac and Gayle Rankin) continues to live on in her memories.
“It wasn’t just his interpretation,” the actor said of Gold’s Hamlet. “It was what his interpretation led the actors to do. It was something that I still really thought about a lot, just as a person, not necessarily as an artist. It stayed with me in my own life, and so I knew that I wanted to be a part of Macbeth.”
Dizzia is on the stage of the Longacre for quite some time because the way in which Gold has directed the Scottish Play is ensemble-based, meaning actors come and go from the periphery. She doesn’t only portray Lady Macduff; she also gets to stand above the witches’ cauldron at one point. When a scene comes to life, actors simply walk centerstage and begin their cutthroat scheming. Lady Macduff, Dizzia’s central role, has one crucial scene in the tragedy, and the actor tries to find a unique angle for her on-stage portrayal.
“Sam said, ‘Lady Macduff only has one scene,’ and I was like, ‘You don’t have to sell me on it.’ I’ve seen Macbeth so many times, and it’s always one of my favorite scenes,” she said. “It really stuck out to me, both Lady Macduff’s scene and then the really desperate, heartbreaking scene when Macduff hears the news of what happened to his family. Those are, for me, two scenes that really stuck out both in the reading of the play and performances I had seen.”
For some people in Dizzia’s shoes, watching how other actors have brought Lady Macduff to life could alter their own performance, so they stay away from movies and filmed stage productions. That’s not the case for Dizzia.
“I really like to look at other people’s interpretations, especially when something has been around for so long,” said Dizzia, who can also be seen in Showtime’s The First Lady. “I really like to see all the different iterations of it. … What are the things that were important to the storytelling, and what are some things maybe that I felt that there’s still room to explore, especially with something that has been performed for so long and so expertly. I want to see what room is left in there. So I watched a lot of Macbeths. I watched a lot. I thought a lot about other performances I had seen, and then I looked really closely at the text.”
When working with the two dramaturgs associated with this Broadway version of Macbeth, Dizzia explored Lady Macduff’s dialogue — line by line. She asked many questions of the two Shakespearean experts, even questions she at first thought were “dumb.”
“It’s really important to me to ask all the dumb questions and not take anything for granted,” she said. “Lady Macduff really started to emerge for me in a way that I hadn’t seen her before in my own understanding of her. The literary blurb about Lady Macduff is that she represents home life. She represents a woman who is conforming more to the expectations of the world that she lives in — playing the role of the wife and the mother — and that she represents the people who are left behind. She’s not apart of the war, except in the way that she’s affected by it and is supporting her husband, but when you look at her text really closely, she’s very cynical.”
Dizzia doesn’t buy that interpretation, at least not wholesale.
“You read it in several places that Lady Macduff represents a moral, traditional woman,” Dizzia said. “But when you look at her really closely, that’s not the case I don’t think. I think that she is also in a place where she doesn’t say explicitly that she wants more power, but she certainly bemoans the fact that she doesn’t have any. There’s a line when she’s talking to her kid, and the kid is saying, ‘Who hangs the traitors?’ And Lady Macduff says, ‘The honest men.’ When you read it at first, it makes sense, like a binary. There are the bad people, and then the good people hang the bad people. But when you look at her last monologue that she says the ‘earthly world, where to do harm is often laudable,’ I think she doesn’t mean that. The men who call themselves honest — there is no real thing of a good person and bad person. There are the people who call themselves good and then exact their punishments on the other people in order to get power. That was something that became important for me.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Macbeth, featuring Maria Dizzia, continues through July 10 at the Longacre Theatre on Broadway. Click here for more information and tickets.
