CIVIL WAR MACBETH

Scotland is a county the war has already used up. Duncan is a tired commander in a good coat. The three who meet Macbeth are not witches in a fog. They are people the war made strange, waiting in a church with the roof gone, and they say his name the way a surgeon says a diagnosis. *Civil War Macbeth* keeps Shakespeare’s plot and, where the couple and the witches speak, his verse. The soldiers speak 1864. The book is one story in two forms. The reading is twelve short chapters, written to be heard, from the field through the chair, the wood, and the head, and on into Reconstruction, until Malcolm clears three plates. The rehearsal script is the same story laid out for actors: names on their own lines, italics for the room, and a second half that does not stop when the head comes off. What follows the war is not a joke and not a new plot. It is the morning after. Shakespeare’s play is in the public domain. The frame, and everything after the crowning, is this telling. The living names in the script are a way to hear a voice. They are not a cast. Replace them with your company on the first day.