Black Cast Conjures White Genius: Unraveling the Mystique of Orson Welles’s “Voodoo” Macbeth

Abstract

Orson Welles directed an influential all-black adaptation of Macbeth for the Negro Theatre Unit of the Works Progress Administration in 1936, in which the play’s setting was famously transposed to the nineteenth-century Caribbean, deliberately evoking historical resonances between Macbeth and the Haitian Emperor Henri Christophe. As with any Welles endeavor, numerous fascinating anecdotes surround the production, many of which remain unverifiable and impossible to separate from Welles’s unusual talent as a provocateur. Most notoriously, Welles claimed after the fact to have once filled in for the ailing lead actor when the show was on tour in Indianapolis; years later, he recounted with pride how he performed the role so convincingly in blackface that no one noticed that it was a white actor, much less Orson Welles, performing as Macbeth. Such an anecdote is, by necessity, deviously unverifiable, for it turns on the supposed fluency of Welles’s performative passing: if anyone had actually recognized Welles (no reviewers noted him), his “blackness” would not have been a success. Stories such as these capture the mix of clever self-promotion and audacity that would come to characterize the career of the then twenty-one-year-old artist. But they also begin to convey a more troubling blend of racially progressive politics and racially insensitive opportunism on Welles’s part that are characteristic of the Macbeth production as a whole. The following essay complicates the “Voodoo” Macbeth mystique by detailing some of the ambivalently progressive and conventional aspects that it embodies.