‘Voodoo Macbeth’ at Heartland Film
Five years before Orson Welles directed Citizen Kane, the 1941 film that rocketed Welles to international fame, he directed an all-Black production of Macbeth at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem, New York. This adaptation of the Shakespeare tragedy relied on the play’s exact wording but placed it in the setting of Haiti, hence its nickname Voodoo Macbeth.
Welles was 21 at the time.
Voodoo Macbeth dramatizes the conception and birth of this fraught but highly successful production which can be seen as a landmark in the history of African American performance. The film, produced by the University of California School of Cinematic Arts, brings us back to 1936 when America was enduring the hardships of the Depression. This was a time when Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs put many Americans to work, including artists and performers.
The film spotlights the mechanism through which the New Deal funded Voodoo; the Federal Theatre Project’s Negro Unit headed by Rose McClendon. The experienced actress, played by Inger Tudor, convinces co-director John Houseman (played by Daniel Kuhlman) to bring Macbeth to Harlem’s Lafayette Theatre. They choose Welles to direct.
Welles, played by Jewell Wilson Bridges, reimagines Macbeth in a Haitian setting and eventually wins the loyalty of the all-Black cast and crew. To borrow a Norman Mailer metaphor, this production gets the meat and bones of this true-life story right, but not the soup. There’s something slightly too contemporary about Kuhlman’s articulation of Welles, in both body language and speech (especially when compared to Tom Burke’s portrayal of Welles in the 2020 film Mank). Fortunately, the rest of the cast does better — particularly Tudor in her evocation of McClendon.
Still, if you can get past Bridges’ performance and the cinematography which often seem flat and stagey even offstage — this is a student production after all — there are rewards to be had. You follow Welles as he gathers his mostly amateur cast together, among them a boxer, a singer, a drummer, and dancers. The challenges of organizing a theatrical production include protests by the Harlem Communists convinced that Welles was concocting a comical version of the Shakespeare play. Another challenge comes from an opportunistic congressman who thinks the production itself is Communist. There are also numerous mishaps including the collapse of a stage set after the name “Macbeth” is uttered onstage during rehearsals.
A revealing moment in the film comes when Welles attempts to train Cuba Johnson (Wrekless Watson) to deliver his lines in a Shakespearian manner. The role (or lack of role) of vernacular English in Shakespearian performance is just one of the witch’s brew of issues of race and representation the film touches on. Often the film feels more 2020, when it was released, than 1936. Especially when Welles, in one scene, dons blackface to play Macbeth. You might question the film’s take on the white savior complex. You might question whether Welles himself appropriated this role in real life.
In real life, this production opened to a packed house on April 14, 1936. After a ten-week-run, which generated packed houses but mixed reviews, it went on to tour the country, including a stop in Indianapolis.
You can see four minutes of the original production here, taken from newsreel footage.
