Well before the play’s first murder, Lady Macbeth establishes her place among Shakespeare’s most treacherous characters with this invocation:
Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood.
Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose …
Being evil is one thing. Praying to be filled with evil is quite another. This is going down to the crossroads at midnight before trains were invented.
“Shakespeare took a common prayer and turned it on its head to make it that much more evil,” said Roxanne Fay, writer and star of the one-woman show, Thrice to Mine.
Thrice to Mine is the result of Roxanne wanting “to see how much of what Shakespeare wrote about her was true. And basically none of it was.”
Roxanne wanted to know what life would have been like 11th Century England.
“I had always known that Macbeth was based on real people in the history of the United Kingdom,” Roxanne said. “I wanted to know, ‘Wow, I wonder who these people were. Were they really this bad?’”
Her research identified the real King Macbeth, whose 17-year reign was prosperous and mostly peaceful. The wife of another Scot seemed to have been the model for Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, as she urged her husband to murder to advance his career.
This research was the genesis of Thrice to Mine. The work is a result of Roxanne “filling in blanks and doing what ifs, but me also wanting to embrace Shakespeare because Shakespeare is what I do. I enjoy performing and studying and observing, and I wanted to see what I could find out about what Shakespeare had written,” she said.
Roxanne would up doing much of the writing close to the source when she was named artist-in-residence at Hawthornden Castle in Lasswade, Scotland.
The castle serves as a writers’ retreat and, aside from communal breakfasts and dinners, writers are left alone to write, with no demands to finish anything by the end of the retreat.
“We were there to write and have the solitude,” Roxanne said.
Roxanne grew up in St. Petersburg and spent years in New York, Chicago and Hawaii developing her skills as an actor, director and playwright. Since returning to the Bay area she’s become one of the most acclaimed and prolific theater artists in the region.
Roxanne first performed Thrice to Mine in 2019. She’s delighted to be performing it with Jobsite, especially since Jobsite will be performing Macbeth in its upcoming season.
Fans of Shakespeare and Macbeth “will get a kick out of the show,” Roxanne said, adding that even novices can enjoy it because “it’s a way to really reach into that period of time and see what it was like to live there, what it was like to live in that time, especially what it was like to be a woman in that time.”
Thrice to Mine begins Wednesday and runs in Shimberg Playhouse through Aug. 25. Buy tickets here.