That Voodoo Macbeth, a new film recounting how Orson Welles (played by Jewell Wilson Bridges) brought Shakespeare’s tragedy to Harlem in 1936 with an all-Black cast, is being theatrically released on October 21 is either a deliberate nod to history or a fitting coincidence. The date falls mere days before the exact 75th anniversary of when the first member of the Hollywood Ten, screenwriter John Howard Lawson, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC, on October 27, 1947. His subsequent expulsion from Hollywood sparked the blacklisting of a long list of entertainment industry professionals accused of being communists.
While Voodoo Macbeth is not a documentary, it fictionalizes an episode more than a decade before HUAC launched its purge of leftists in the motion picture industry. In the film, HUAC co-founder and Texas Democratic Representative Martin Dies (played by Hunter Bodine), hounds Welles’s 1936 adaptation of Macbeth.
The play is portrayed as coming under government scrutiny because it was funded by the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), a New Deal program that gave employment to actors and provided entertainment for the masses during the Great Depression. Like other New Deal programs and agencies financed by taxpayer dollars, FTP projects were regulated by Congress, with conservative lawmakers and anti-New Dealers especially suspicious of them.
In the movie, Dies expressed his concern about “subversive” propaganda being incorporated into the FTP’s shows, as America grappled with hard times at home during the Depression and the struggle against fascism abroad.
The original play Voodoo Macbeth premiered in Harlem’s Lafayette Theatre and was a production of the Negro Theater Unit of the FTP. Just as the director of the FTP was a woman, Hallie Flanagan, the New York Negro Theater Unit was co-directed by actress Rose McClendon (played in the film by Inger Tudor), who started branches in ten other American cities as well. The film shows that the all-Black cast was alarming to racists, who doubted that Black actors had the necessary sophistication to mount the Bard’s tragedy.
A renowned Harlem Renaissance figure who hobnobbed with Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes, McClendon co-founded the Negro People’s Theatre in Harlem in 1935, and the first play they presented was Clifford Odets’s ode to labor militancy, Waiting for Lefty. Due to health issues, McClendon sought the support of the white producer John Houseman (played by Daniel Kuhlman) to co-direct the FTP’s Negro Theater Unit. Houseman in turn recruited the actor Orson Welles to direct the Macbeth adaptation. Welles at twenty years old had already built a successful stage and radio career—one year later he would develop the iconic radio character “The Shadow,” and in 1938, terrify people across the United States with his Halloween broadcast of Martian invasion in a radio version of H.G. Wells (no relation) science-fiction tale The War of the Worlds.
In this 2022 look back, as the team at the Lafayette Theatre prepares to produce Macbeth, there is a brilliant brainstorm that makes stage history by resetting Shakespeare’s classic from Scotland to Haiti. The movie version of Voodoo Macbeth dramatizes the trials and tribulations of the real-life story about the creation and presentation of the play. Other real-life historic figures portrayed include Juano Hernandez (Ephraim Lopez), a Black Puerto Rico-born actor who went on to appear in films including 1949’s Intruder in the Dust, 1964’s The Pawnbroker, and 1970’s They Call Me Mister Tibbs!
This 108-minute movie brings alive, albeit in a dramatized, fictionalized format, a vital piece of theater history. In particular, like Viola Davis in The Woman King, Inger Tudor resurrects an important historical Black woman who has been largely forgotten with an impressive, poignant performance. (Inger Tudor won a Best Actress award at the Harlem Film Festival for portraying Rose McClendon.)
According to press notes, when the original Voodoo Macbeth opened in 1936 it was sold out for ten weeks, then went on a successful tour, demonstrating what state subsidy for the arts could accomplish. The smash hit marked Orson Welles’ entrance on the stage as a major artist, who went on to direct 1941’s cinematic anti-capitalist classic Citizen Kane.
Voodoo Macbeth is an educational, entertaining slice of theater history that has so far won fourteen awards and three additional nominations on the film festival circuit, including: Best Film, Best Production and Best Actress at the Harlem Film Festival; Best in Festival and the Audience Choice Award at the Sedona Film Festival; and Best Feature Film at Dances with Films. Tudor, who co-starred in the Goliath TV series and was in 2010’s The Social Network, may be a strong contender for an Academy Award nomination for her powerful, poignant portrayal of the great, historic Rose McClendon.
In a remarkable coincidence, only days after receiving a press release about Voodoo Macbeth, I serendipitously met Ms. Tudor when she joined my table at the Getty Villa’s cafe prior to the September 7 premiere of Sophocles’ Oedipus at the Villa’s Malibu amphitheater. (I had also met Orson Welles himself in Paris when I was a little boy. Small world!)
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