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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

Voodoo villains, black magic, Hecate, Orson Welles

College

Humanities

Department

English

Abstract

On 14 April 1936 at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem, Orson Welles’ adapted Shakespearean play “Voodoo” Macbeth opened. The play was set in nineteenth-century Haiti and cast with only African Americans. This production was the first professional Shakespearean play with an allblack cast performed in the history of the United States, and it was a stupendous success. “Voodoo” Macbeth was produced by the Negro Unit of the Federal Theatre Project, an organization started during the Great Depression as a way to provide jobs for unemployed actors and stage workers. The goal of my project was to examine the gendered relationship between the male Hecate and the three Voodoo priestesses in Orson Welles’ “Voodoo” Macbeth as a commentary on the male control of twentieth-century African American religious and secular practices. As I began my research, however, I refocused my topic around Welles’ representation of Voodoo and how it conflicted with or was similar to white and African-Americans’ differing perceptions of the religion in terms of sorcery, magic, and gender roles. Doing so allowed me to better establish the type of Voodoo within the play, and therefore the type of Voodoo “master” Hecate is portrayed as.

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