In 2014, three twelve year old girls walked into the Wisconsin woods to play. Only two would walk out.

The third would drag her body - mutilated with 19 stab wounds - through the woods to the edge of the interstate, hoping to be found. Two pre-teen girls had attempted murder, enacted unfathomable violence on their friend, and left her to die. Police would soon learn the bizarre and horrifying motive: a blood sacrifice to become Slender Man proxies.

A lank, spectral man who lurks in the shadows and abducts children, Slender Man was a character invented for an online photoshop contest. The Slender Man, an idea from a piece of art, became an internet urban legend. The girls stabbed their friend to the brink of death for something that exists only in the imagination.

“Are ye fantastical?” poses Macbeth to three supernatural beings of dubious reality in the woods of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. “Are you real?” he asks. An imagined dagger leads Macbeth towards what seemingly is his fate. Lady Macbeth and Macbeth battle visions of phantom blood and ghosts, apparitions and prophecy, and imaginings that become reality. The fantasies of what may be and dreams of what came before become so entangled that there is no longer a barrier between truth and imagination, possibility and reality.

What does all this have to do with Erica Schmidt’s Mac Beth, where seven private-school girls meet up after school in an abandoned lot for their self-appointed Macbeth club to “do the play”?  Well, everything.

In school the girls explore society, acceptable behavior, maybe a little rebellion here or there. They explore the parameters of what it means to fit in as a normal girl in polite society.

In the woods they explore the wild world Macbeth allows: agency, power, gender dynamics, occult fantasy, sex, and violence. They play-pretend and fantasize about ideas that are forbidden in public. In the woods, the girls explore things that scare them.

For the Macbeth club girls, a 400 year old script becomes their outlet, catharsis, and vehicle of fantasy -  in turn silly,  authentic, and wild. They can find themselves in landscapes as familiar as Breakfast Club or Mean Girls, as reckless as Fight Club, or as frightening as Lord of the Flies. Landscapes where fantasy can become reality. As Shakespeare said in another play (or West World, if you prefer), “These violent delights have violent ends.”

Perhaps girls have always escaped to the woods to try to find themselves. And perhaps, from time to time, girls have gotten a little lost there. The woods play host to childhood games where best friends might run through the trees by their houses feigning getting desperately lost in the wilderness, and to teenage adventures of girlfriends sneaking off to the thickets to try a stolen stash of a parent’s boxed wine or cigarettes, or a bit of sexuality for the first time. Our own youthful experiences, the girls of Erica Shmidt’s Mac Beth, the girls of the Salem Witch Trials (who went to the woods to discover wildness in an age of repression), and even the girls of the Slender Man stabbing all represent degrees of girls who have gone to the woods - to a private place where they could not be judged - to explore not only who they are, but also who they could be.

And perhaps I’ll leave you with one more thought from a favorite song from my own teenage years...

“I’m just a girl in the world. That’s all that you’ll let me be.”  - No Doubt

- Jennifer Alice Acker

Director