Ask anyone, and they’ll assert that this writer is usually even handed, even to a fault, in his praise and blame of a stage production’s every virtue, every fault. But strange things happen in both theater and life to blow the staunchest ship off course into one true harbor’s anchoring embrace.
In my case, it was meeting Shakespeare’s character “Malcolm,” in the Mosesian Center for the Arts theater lobby, chatting casually with a very pretty, very present-day woman, but not at all averse to turning, with alacrity, to a star-struck critic there to review the evening’s presentation of “Macbeth” rudely butting in.
This sudden politeness came not from a stage character in every way, in his very own words, “bloody, deceitful, avaricious, false,” and, if that weren’t enough, “smacking of every sin that has a name,” but a true gentleman of the theater.
Still starstruck, I persisted in my belief I was talking to “Malcolm” — and only tangentially to the actor, Chingwe Padraig Sullivan.
Around me, I could glimpse with peripheral vision other theater patrons chatting with other actors in the lobby of the Mosesian Center for the Arts on Arsenal Street in Watertown, Massachusetts, while I was chatting with the one actor whose soliloquy formed the very pivot in the plot of one of our greatest dramatist’s greatest tragedies.
Whatever they thought of themselves, I dismissed these other patrons as ‘unfortunates’ and paid only half attention when the beauty, present, who formed the third of our rapt trio paid my critic’s fashion an earnest compliment — but that’s by the way. And, I hope, fervently forgiven.
Sullivan graciously agreed with me when I asserted that his character, “Malcolm,” son in exile of the murdered king Duncan, clothing himself verbally, ambiguously, with ‘bottomless sin’ not only as a stratagem to give pause to his interlocutor’s uncritical, enthusiasm for himself, “Malcolm,” as the ‘angel’ to lead the English and Scottish troops against the Murderous Macbeth but also, to assert that only by virtue of heavenly grace, so far, there was no simple, binary opposition between an older suspected regicide and a youthful prince but, on the contrary, a shared human brotherhood existing between them as ‘equals in evil’ — though Malcolm’s own evil ‘brotherhood’ being, as yet, only potential, only available to a youth in the progress of time — and with the help of fortune’s abundant snares set ready to spring temptation multitudinous upon his privileged, young royal blood!
I had to pause for breath after this, even for me, lengthy critical judgement, but I soon recovered — which recovery, I fervently believe, has made me the critic I still am today.
Your delivery full of ineffable conviction, as “Malcolm,” I continued, starstruck, breathing heavily — but still critically — informed the characters “Malcolm/Macbeth” as Shakespeare conceived them, brilliantly, not as opposed protagonists of yet another sordid tale but as twins, both great with potential — one, aged, of waning vigor, struck down, tragically, by the still greater, later, thus more urgent temptations enumerated so eloquently, so easefully, in your soliloquy, young “Malcolm.”
From stage to lobby, from viewer to star-struck critic, well-spent in another afternoon, in company, growing dusky, late, but never forgotten.
P.S. “Malcolm” — played by Chingwe Padraig Sullivan— not only recognized, slyly, brilliantly, in one endless, unfaltering soliloquy, his tragic ‘brotherhood’ with his father’s killer but went on to defeat on the battlefield this tragic, charm besotted older ‘brother’, soon afterwards, by shouldering Birnam Wood to carry to Dunsinane.
A feat of woodsmanship, albeit theatrical, full of pathos, which didn’t leave Sullivan, unlike your Artscope critic, breathing heavily at all. Ahh, youth…
(The next Actors’ Shakespeare Project presentation, Kate Hamill’s “Little Women,” adapted from the novel by Louisa May Alcott, will be performed February 5 through March 1, 2026 at the Dorothy and Charles Mosesian Center for the Arts, 321 Arsenal St., Watertown, Massachusetts. For more information, visit actorsshakespeareproject.org.)