By Isaac Hamlet
Paddock calls and the star-sighted aims of some grow out of the smothered ambition of the less fortunate. Power is fought over, and onlookers deem who has the right to hold such aims. It is on this stage that Lady Macbeth and Her Pal, Megan exists.
On Friday, come ye spirits that tend to mortal thought, come below the battlements of Riverside Theater at 7:30 p.m. if your aspirations guide you there for Megan Gogerty’s latest one-woman show.
“The dirty secret of this play is that it has almost nothing to do with Lady Macbeth,” said Gogerty, the writer and performer of Lady Macbeth and Her Pal, Megan.
The plot of the show — and a facet of how the show came to be — begins when a friend of Gogerty tells her she can’t play Lady Macbeth. While Shakepeare’s character is wrought by the ambition and human turmoil, Gogerty is “the human equivalent of a golden retriever.”
From that event, Gogerty decided to invoke Lady Macbeth and pair that instance with another experience she’s familiar with as a standup comedian.
“People would ask me what it’s like to be a woman comedian — which I used to be sort of prickly about,” Gogerty said. “No one asks me what it’s like to be a woman professor or anything else.”
She decided to answer that question by doing a show on her experience as a female comedian. However, she realized there was a more fundamental question she had to answer first, and so she decided to do a show about what it’s like to be a woman.
“In standup, you set them up and knock them down,” she said. “In theater, you set people up to go on a ride fueled by empathy. Either they recognize their own lives in the story I’m telling, or they have a new appreciation for the bind of 51 percent of the population.”
Saffron Henke, the show’s director, describes the production as “a woman’s exploration of her mid-life through Lady Macbeth and standup.” The show also is meant to reverberate with among women with high aspirations, especially following this past election.
“[The script] is smart, funny, and feminist,” said Kelly Garrett, the show’s stage manager. “It’s also exceptionally relevant to today’s world and especially today’s women. For me, it really eloquently sums up, in under 90 minutes, a whole host of things I’ve felt for years but never had words for. It’s a much-needed reminder that I’m not alone in those feelings. I’m excited for the audience to experience that.”
Garrett also worked with Gogerty as an assistant stage manager on her 2015 show, Housebroken, and she jumped at the opportunity to work with the other two women on this project
Henke and Gogerty are longtime friends, though this is their first full collaboration. It also represents the first time Henke has directed a production for Riverside Theater after having performed there in the past.
All three women had envisioned a Clinton victory, and so Gogerty worried that the show would lose some of its relevance. This was not the case.
“After the election, we had to do a big rewrite,” Henke said. “[It] helped us clarify the scenes about women and power. I think that helped us define and refine Lady Macbeth and Megan as characters.”
Garrett estimates that, of approximately 19 drafts Gogerty wrote, there have been three full draft changes during rehearsal, including minor tweaks here and there.
“She’s always refining it,” Garrett said. “That’s actually one of my favorite things about working with Megan. It makes the rehearsal process unique, more fluid and collaborative than any other production I’ve ever worked on. She drops pieces she no longer likes, tries out new jokes, works with timing. It’s really fun to go on that journey with her.”
Through the creative process, the crew dug into the script, trying to mine more and more of its potential. Over the course of that, and though it still has ample amounts of her trademark comedy, the show became one of the Gogerty’s more personal projects.
“With every show I do, I try to challenge myself,” Gogerty said. “With this one I wanted to see if I could speak from a place of vulnerability.”
After the Riverside run (through March 12), Gogerty will continue to perform the show, including on a journey to the home of its titular femme fatale as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
“The dream would be that in this very chaotic moment in history, that this show helps women get through it,” Henke said.
Hopefully, should you screw your courage to the sticking place, we’ll not fail to endure.