How Female Playwrights Are Adapting, and Revamping, ‘Macbeth’

When the playwright Jiehae Park was in high school, applying for college was a competitive sport. One of her friends, she recounted recently, applied to every Ivy League college and only got into one: the University of Pennsylvania. Instead of feeling joy, her friend started weeping, bemoaning what she considered to be the inferior Ivy. “Which is a bananas thing to say,” Park noted.

For her part, Park went to Amherst, not an Ivy League school. But that high school experience stayed with her, becoming the inspiration for “Peerless,” a “Macbeth” adaptation about twin sisters who are so determined to get into an elite college that they resort to murder. This Primary Stages production, onstage at 59E59 Theaters through Sunday, follows the major plot points of “Macbeth,” but the setting and story couldn’t be more different: the cutthroat environment of college admissions among the students at a Midwestern high school.

Each year brings new stagings of Shakespeare’s plays, but a few recent works, inspired by “Macbeth,” have stood out because they were written by female playwrights who refocused the story on the inner lives of young women. In addition to “Peerless,” there are Sophie McIntosh’s “Macbitches,” about a group of college students who backstab one another in order to get the lead role in a school play, and “Mac Beth,” by Erica Schmidt, who condensed the text to 90 minutes and set her work in an all-girls high school.

In “Peerless,” ruthless competition and the toxicity of the model minority myth are among the issues addressed. The twins, who are Asian American, decide to kill the competition: the Native American and Black students they believe unfairly got their spots. This scenario speaks to the objections to affirmative action, making the play especially timely as the Supreme Court considers race-based college admissions. Alexis Soloski called it a “sly and polished adaptation” in her review for The Times.

The sisters “are the logical result of the system,” Park said. “It’s so effective at setting up ways in which groups that have less power, but perhaps more power than another group that has even less power, will stand against those less powerful groups. But the people with the most power? They’re just chilling.”

The actor Sasha Diamond said starring in “Peerless” — and previously in “Teenage Dick,” Mike Lew’s adaptation of “Richard III” — has helped her to feel included in a part of the literary canon that she’s always felt excluded from. “The way that we are educated as Americans is with a Western European literary history,” said Diamond, who is Chinese and white. “The texts that we draw from and the things that we learn are not about us. And so when these playwrights adapt the stories that have been taught to us as ‘the canon,’” she said, and then make them specific to “our cultures or the world that we live in, it is a reclaiming. And it is empowering.”

Schmidt said the mixture of magic and murders most foul led her to write “Mac Beth,” which Red Bull Theater produced. “Macbeth,” she said, is “so satisfying, and it has so much dark comedy in it that people keep coming back to it.” (In her Times review, Laura Collins-Hughes remarked on the “unusual immediacy” of a production that made the characters “we know from ‘Macbeth’ legible in new ways.”)

The playwrights all agreed that a woman’s perspective is a natural fit for Shakespeare’s play about power and corruption. After all, Lady Macbeth is arguably the more ruthless of the pair: she encourages Macbeth to murder the king. “Lady Macbeth is the most interesting person. She’s the best part of the play,” said Park, whose “Peerless” has been produced around the country since its 2015 premiere at Yale Repertory Theater.

For McIntosh, whose “Macbitches” was presented at the Chain Theater in August, these retellings consider what ambition can look like in women. “Male ambition is almost universally respected to a certain extent,” McIntosh said. “With female ambition, there’s almost an expectation of pettiness to it. And the expectation of, ‘She doesn’t know what she’s getting herself into. She’s being needy. She’s being catty. She’s being selfish.’”

These adaptations also embrace the violence of the source material. Macbeth kills the king, then his rivals, and a child. Eventually, Macbeth is also killed and Lady Macbeth commits suicide. Schmidt wanted to examine young people’s susceptibility to violence, and drew inspiration from school shootings and the so-called Slender Man stabbing in 2014 (the case in which two 12-year-old girls stabbed a classmate multiple times after luring her to a park). In “Mac Beth,” a group of teenage girls meet in a field to do their own version of “Macbeth.” What begins as playacting becomes more gruesome, with the girls eventually killing a schoolmate.

“I feel that we all have this capacity within us for killing people, that this is part of our nature as humans,” said Schmidt, whose play has also been performed around the country. “And I think that it’s really difficult for people to accept that or to believe that or to see that in themselves. And so when you have all these school shootings, or you have young women behaving in this extremely violent way, suddenly it forces you to think about what’s happening in a different way.”

With “Macbitches,” McIntosh, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, wanted to deliver contemporary social commentary, citing the toxic power dynamics she said she witnessed between students and faculty members at the college. As she met other young artists after graduating, she said, “I was really surprised to hear that so many of their experiences paralleled ours so closely.”

In her riff on “Macbeth,” McIntosh dispenses with plot points, instead evoking similar themes — abuse of power and the price of ambition. A group of young women audition for a college production of “Macbeth,” but when the freshman gets the coveted role of Lady Macbeth, the others become jealous. As the play escalates toward violence, it is clear that something is rotten in the state of the drama program, with abuses of power on the part of the faculty.

It’s “Macbeth” by way of #MeToo. And Juan A. Ramírez, in his Times review, commended it for juggling “headier themes while remaining a lively college drama.” McIntosh, who served as dramaturge for a college production of “Macbeth,” said she wanted to highlight how ambition in the entertainment industry can be used to excuse all kinds of misbehavior. She also wanted to call out the sentiment that “art has to be suffering,” she said. “If you defy that, it means that you’re not a good actor, you don’t have what it takes, you’re not committed to the craft.”

These reimagined productions of Shakespeare haven’t come without criticism, though. During a production of “Mac Beth” in Seattle, Schmidt recalls audience members laughing at the actresses playing male characters. “Another source of criticism was like, ‘Why isn’t there something explaining to us why they’re doing the play?’” Schmidt said, which to her feels like a “devaluing of the teenage voice, or the young woman.”

Park said some audience members have issues with her protagonists being young Asian American women, and of her portrayal of Asian Americans who are unapologetically villainous. “It’s so tied up in the model minority expectation, of who’s allowed to be anything other than perfect,” she said. “It’s a legit question of, are we at the point culturally where there’s space for more complex representations? I hope so.”