Turtleback students perform 'Macbeth'


RANCHO BERNARDO —— Turtleback Elementary School teacher Larry House believes it's never too early to encourage students to appreciate William Shakespeare.

So every year, House's fifth-grade students at the Rancho Bernardo campus perform one of the bard's great works.

This year's production, which began Tuesday morning and will run through Thursday evening, is the one that superstitious actors dare not name for fear of it going amuck.

The work called "the Scottish play" by the superstitious and "Macbeth" by others, tells the story of a man and his wife whose lust for power drive them to kill both king and comrades to take up the Scottish crown.

Thirty-one fifth-graders, dressed in period costumes, are performing an abbreviated one-hour version of the tragedy in the school's multipurpose room. On Tuesday, the cast took to the boards in their first performance in front of a live audience of their peers and teachers.

Although some admitted to a little stage fright beforehand, the play went off without a hitch.

"I was really excited and sort of nervous performing in front of an audience for the first time," said Kaylee Yurczyk, who played Lady Macbeth.

Kaylee said she plans to enunciate and speak more slowly next time, but was happy with her performance.

Adding drama to the play, the production included special effects, a sword fight and hecklers reminiscent of true Elizabethan audiences. The children also used the center of the room to involve the audience in the production, often causing audience members to giggle and whisper as the actors walked by.

As the first scene unfolded, three children playing the soothsaying witches tell Macbeth and his friend Banquo that Macbeth will be king one day.

The information, which Macbeth shares with his wife, Lady Macbeth, awakens their ambition and drives them to take their future in their own hands and kill the current ruler.

As the multipurpose room dimmed at the end of each scene, plain-clothed student hecklers from House's class shouted comments about the play, such as "What do you think about Lady Macbeth? She is not exactly Mother Teresa!" or "We should have gone to see 'Bambi'!" In one of the play's most memorable scenes, Macbeth enters into the witches' cavern and is shown the ghost of his dead friend Banquo, whose face is smeared with blood.

For the scene, the darkened multipurpose room suddenly began to flash repeatedly with the flickering of a strobe light as the three witches danced around a black cauldron intoning the famous "Double, double toil and trouble; fire burn and cauldron bubble!" as Macbeth enters.

Feeling guilty and slowly going mad, Macbeth, played by Michael Schmidt, 11, is told to be wary of MacDuff, a Scottish nobleman whose wife and children were killed by Macbeth.

The play progresses as Lady Macbeth also begins to go mad, sleepwalks and eventually kills herself. Macbeth is then overthrown by MacDuff in a sword fight.

After the performance, Michael said playing the lead role of Macbeth was a challenge because of the number of lines to learn and the choreography for a simple sword fight. He said he and his classmates have been rehearsing since December.


