This year’s fall play, “Macbeth,” was a triumph featuring innovative performances, live music, and sustainably made set and prop pieces. 

In reflection of the production, Co-Director Danny Tieger had this to say:

Last March, the seventh through ninth graders traveled to Lenox, MA, to see Shakespeare and Company’s production of “Macbeth,” kicking off the eighth-grade unit on the play in their English classes. Later that spring, a group of students began meeting to edit and adapt the script for an IMS audience. They created the framing device of kids playing at recess, cut extraneous dialogue, and added clarity throughout.

Over the past two months, a new group of students took that script and completed the work. They met two to three times a week to build sets, design sound, craft moments, and exchange ideas. They engaged with the ideas of Macbeth as if the story were entirely their own.

For all the reverence now given to Shakespeare’s language, it can be easy to forget that, in its time, a freshly finished draft would have been passed among actors who hastily assembled scenes amid their busy days. These plays, like all forms of human expression, are living documents meant to be played with. As Mr. Clark-Richardson remarked in his curtain speech, “Shakespeare’s plays are a structure, a vehicle, that human beings have been using for four hundred years to express the very best and very worst of what it means to be, or not to be, human.”

Ms. Dominick, Ms. Tieger, and I are exceptionally proud of this cast and crew for the clarity of their vision and the dedication they showed in bringing it to life.

— Danny Tieger
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