theatre teacher, stage manager, generally stressed human

The crew is at least 51% made up of men of woman born

BUT the person who gives the order to fire is a woman

To me, this is a perfect excuse to discuss methods.

MacDuff kills Macbeth with a sword. The sword is not a man of woman born, but it doesn’t matter. MacDuff is the one doing it. Through MacDuff’s conscious action, Macbeth is killed. The sword has no conscious action to take, no agency. It’s merely the tool.

It also backs out a bit. It doesn’t matter if someone else tells MacDuff to kill Macbeth, because, again, conscious thought. MacDuff can choose not to kill Macbeth. His sword can’t, and no manager can force him to. Would it matter if the person who forged the sword was a man of woman born? Lady Macbeth certainly had a hand in the events leading up to all this, and I doubt she counts. In the end, only the person who takes the action that directly causes his death is responsible.

Now, imagine it was a gun, not a sword. Someone else loaded that gun and handed it to him. Also not a factor. A car? As long as it’s driven by MacDuff, I don’t care what the salesman has going on at home.

I’d imagine a superweapon like this must have a “fire” button. In any case, in the preparation of this weapon, there is a final step. If your goal is specifically to kill Macbeth, the person who takes that final step must not be a man of woman born.

What if the last step requires multiple people? Then I’d say they must all qualify. Let’s say there’s two buttons that must be pressed simultaneously to fire the weapon. If either person on either button does not press their button, the weapon doesn’t fire. This makes it a choice, by both people. Both are choosing to kill Macbeth, as both could choose not to. In that sense, the decision is shared. If either one is a man of woman born, then Macbeth cannot be killed by this, as that would be illegal and also very rude.

So here’s how I’m going to put it: the circumstances outlined are not enough to guarantee his death. Though I do appreciate the crew in their work and they will all have their names on the final draft sent to publication, only the last person in the chain is considered in the prophecy.

Thank you for your submission!

(Got caught up in the works gallery on his site for more than a minute, thanks to this post).

"actually the concept album for this musical came out in 2010 and the original song was written in 2006"

"so she knew about the wall 10 years before Trump proposed it be built?"

"well, let's talk about that...

...but that wasn't when the wall was first built...

...this shift in the '90s marked the start of an enforcement philosophy called Prevention Through Deterrence, which basically says that if crossing is made more deadly, fewer people will cross (fact check: it just means that more people die on the journey). From the start, the purpose of the wall was not to physically to stop people from crossing -- it was to make it more deadly to do so.

...and we can also look at the song metaphorically and expansively, as a reference to the policing of migration, to company towns, to gated communities, and the physical and metaphorical walls that throughout history have kept people in and out and defined who does and don't belong.

Sources: 1 & 2 / 3 / 4"

"...how did you just say a hyperlink?"

"why worry about that when you can use this show as an entry-point into a deeper understanding of capitalism's investment in coercive control over human migration, and its long history in the United States?"

"so the song only seems prophetic because the long history of policing and militarizing the border has been ignored, and treated as an outsider position by Trump rather than the continuation of bi-partisan policy dating back decades? and it can be seen to reflect larger patterns of capital controlling people's movement in order to extract land, labor, wealth, and ultimately life from them?"

"and the song slaps"

Turn ON the sound

(For those who are about to ask, it’s called Throne of Blood in English but its actual name is Spiderweb Castle and some Shakespeare scholars are big mad about it because other Shakespeare scholars consider it the best film adaptation of Macbeth ever made and we can’t have that)

THE ARCHERS DIDN’T KNOW MIFUNE’S BLOCKING. Every time you see him fling out an arm he’s actually signaling to the archers which way he’s about to go. That’s it, that’s what they had to go on. And they were shooting on location on Mount Fuji, which Akira Kurosawa had chosen SPECIFICALLY FOR ITS DENSE FOG.

However, BECAUSE this was Akira Kurosawa—if you don’t know that name think “Stanley Kubrick but earlier and Japanese and not quite as much of an asshole to his actors”—and he was insane, Mifune is also wearing real 19th-century feudal lord armor, in the sense that while it’s a modern reproduction it is completely functional. A feudal lord from the early 1800s could have been resurrected in the 1950s when this was filmed, handed this armor, and would have gone “yeah, that’s correct.” There are actually a couple of shots where you see arrows hit his torso and bounce off, or stick in the armor but they’ve very clearly only just barely stuck rather than going through.

So his torso is protected, and there’s a railing in front of him that provides some protection to his legs, and yes, this means THE MOST VULNERABLE PART OF HIM WAS ALSO THE ONLY PART THAT WOULD DEFINITELY KILL HIM: his face. I’m sure it was of very little comfort to him that the archers also weren’t very powerful shots.

Oh, and his character dies by taking an arrow through the neck. You can tell that one is a trick shot because it’s the only shot filmed from that specific angle, but I can imagine Mifune was none too eager to do it after all this.

Another fascinating snippet:

"Lady Asaji" (the Lady MacBeth equivalent) never blinks while the camera is on her. Not once.

It's not easily noticed unless forewarned and looking, but it does contribute to an uncanny-valley feeling that there's something not-quite-right about the character.

I can't remember if the actress (Isuzu Yamada) went all the way with her court makeup and blackened her teeth as this one has done.

Probably not, or there would definitely be comments about it on-line.

I've seen on-line claims that the makeup is based on Kabuki theatre.

Noh, it isn't. :->

It's actually period-correct for a noblewoman of the Heian period (794-1185) and IIRC preceded - also may have inspired - that "female" style of Noh mask.

Here the makeup's being worn by Lady Murasaki Shikibu, who wrote "The Tale of Genji" about 1000 years ago.

If interested in this period and its customs, both very different to the later, better-known Tokugawa-period samurai stuff, "The World of the Shining Prince" by Ivan Morris is a fascinating read.

*****

More method acting with projectile weapons:

James Cagney was shot at with a REAL Thompson submachine gun during the making of both "Public Enemy" (1931) and "Angels With Dirty Faces" (1938).

I blogged about it years ago here, a long-ish post about safety vs realism in movie fights.

Here's Cagney talking about the Public Enemy one.

The Bad Dad Triad: King Lear, Henry IV Part 1, Romeo and Juliet

The "My Wife's A Floozy" Trifecta: Othello, Much Ado About Nothing, the Winter's Tale

The "Me And My Shitty Little Minion Are About To Fuck Up Your Shit Hardcore" Trilogy: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Richard III, the Tempest

The Falstaffiad: Henry IV part 1, Henry IV part 2, The Merry Wives of Windsor

The "Holy Fuck There's Two of 'Em" Saga: Twelfth Night, the Comedy of Errors

The "Dear Diary My Homoerotic Bullshit Has A Body Count Now" Series: Richard II, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus

"Somebody Call Ghostbusters!": Hamlet, Richard III, Macbeth, Julius Caesar

"This Protagonist Sucks So Much Not Even In A Funny Way I Hate This Guy For Real": The Merchant of Venice, Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew

"Kill Claudio. Many Such Cases": Much Ado About Nothing, Measure for Measure, Hamlet*

"Is It Really Shakespeare Unless The Protagonist Is Drenched In Blood 25/8? I Put It To You": Titus Andronicus, Richard III, Coriolanus

"And Then Some Fucker Named Sebastian Got Shipwrecked And Caused Problems": Twelfth Night, The Tempest

single man in possession of a large fortune who is in want of a wife

young woman with low connections who must marry so that she can secure her future

cad whose main goal is to convince someone to elope with him

wealthy, scheming woman whose goal is to ruin the happiness of the aforementioned young woman

Bachelor/Bachelorette

Cad / Floozy

Husband/Wife

Matriarch/Patriarch

Busybody

Then you roll for your stats across the 6 basic Abilities:

Money

Intelligence

Connections

Manners

Looks

Working title, Sense & Snark-ability.