MACBETH and our Shadow: Thoughts from Director Alice Renier
Introduce yourself!
Hi! I’m Alice Renier, an actor, director, and educator who has been based in New York City for the past 15 years. I am also a co-founder of Apocalyptic Artists Ensemble and serve as a Co-Artistic Director and Director of Education for the company. In Spring 2026, I’ll be directing Apocalyptic’s tour of Macbeth co-produced by Red Bull Theater.
What was your first experience with Shakespeare?
I think I was in elementary school the first time I watched a VHS of Emma Thompson in Much Ado About Nothing. It was one of my favorite films growing up. Looking back as an adult, I think I felt unusually seen and validated watching Beatrice fall in love and at the same time embody the desire to violently avenge her cousin, Hero, the way men so often do in our stories. “O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the marketplace.” Beatrice was a heroine who was strong, intelligent, admired, respected, and could also express rage without becoming the villain of the story or a “shrew” - her rage is justified. It never occurred to me how old the play was, I loved that it so perfectly articulated something I understood at a young age about the female experience. Beatrice and Emma Thompson forever.
Why was Macbeth chosen as Apocalyptic’s 2026 School Tour?
Apocalyptic Artists has produced two previous live touring productions - one a tragic romance (2024’s Romeo and Juliet, co-produced with The Classical Theatre of Harlem) and the other a comedy and love letter to the theater (2025’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream co-produced with Red Bull Theater). Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s darkest plays, a play that investigates the nature of evil. I believe it’s important to provide audiences with useful spaces to wrestle with the dark things in life as much as we offer spaces to experience love and theatrical joy. I think it was during a rehearsal break for Midsummer last Spring that the company founders had an informal conversation and found we were all on the same page: Macbeth should be next!
Why take the show into schools as well as inviting them to a theater venue?
Apocalyptic Artists Ensemble is founded on the belief that the barriers between audience and artists need to be more permeable, especially in the case of theater for young audiences. One of the key ways we accomplish this is by bringing performances into non-traditional theater spaces, like a school. When we perform for young people, we bring them as close to the action as possible so that they are not spectators but participants in the event. We want these classic plays to be examined not just for their language or history, but for their relevance to and articulation of our audiences’ lived experience.
When and where does your production take place?
To borrow a phrase, “Once upon a time. Not this time, but some other time.*” What I love about live theater is that it has permission to be non-literal. The design of the play will feel like contemporary New York City, but have permission to borrow from other places and times as it serves the story.
What is on your mind as you head into production?
Doubleness has been on my mind. The word “double” is repeated throughout this play (“He’s here in double trust…,” “Double double toil and trouble…”). To me, Macbeth invites us to examine how darkness in our lives and our world is a reflection of our shadow selves.
I was recently introduced to an African proverb: “When there is no enemy within, the enemies outside cannot hurt you.” In the digital age, our attention is often kept focused on the image we present of ourselves to the world, what people see. When bad things happen, when people do evil things, it’s comfortable to live under an illusion that all those things are dissociated from how we operate in our daily lives, how we think. Many of us consciously craft a “false face” on the internet, curating our Instagram grids and Facebook pages and TikToks and dating profiles so that we can be perceived as the most socially laudable version of ourselves. This play cautions us against neglecting to investigate and reckon with our innermost selves.
I think the moment that sets this tragedy in motion is not the moment Macbeth becomes a murderer. It is the moment he makes a decision to forsake himself, abandon his personal moral code, to “catch the nearest way” to his desires. He creates a separation between the self he performs and his private self. “False face must hide what the false heart doth know” he says to his wife. It is the willing disintegration of self that leads to Macbeth’s undoing and violence in Scotland.
My hope is that this story feels unsettling to our audience because Macbeth could so easily be anyone. I’m looking forward to sharing a production that calls us to confront the potential for harm that lives in all of us, because our inner worlds inevitably become our outer world. We’ll be asking: who are you when no one is looking? And how are the things we do and think in secret reflected back to us?
*This phrase is taken from Dr. Kwame Scruggs and his work with Alchemy Inc.
Performances for MACBETH begin March 20th, 2026. Reach out to apocalypticartists@gmail.com to book!
