Shakespeare enthusiasts spent their Halloween shivering through the Grassroots Shakespeare Company’s bloody production of Macbeth and King Lear in The Castle Amphitheater on Oct. 31.
The performance began at 8 p.m. with a half-hour preshow of live music, and included a costume contest between the two shows. The night finished up at about 12:30 a.m. with a competition to see which groundling (standing audience member) got the most fake blood on them.
The stage blood is made of corn syrup and Kool-Aid, tastes like a Tootsie Pop, and washes out of clothes with cold water. For audience members like Aliya Strong, who won the Grassroots costume competition, blood splatters are an expected and even sought-after part of Grassroots shows.
“I love being a groundling, with all the blood,” Strong said. “I feel like you don't really get the splash-zone experience anywhere else.”
Catering to their bloodthirsty audience, one cast member went as far as to pause after being stabbed, stumble three or four steps to the edge of the stage, dramatically burst their blood bag and then limp back to their spot — to much laughter and applause.
Not all audience members sat in the so-called splash zone; there were chairs set up in the raised stone steps of the amphitheater. The slightly increased distance didn’t stop the audience from interacting with cast members, booing when a character did something dastardly or else shouting out their answers to rhetorical questions during monologues.
Steven Pond, who played the titular roles of both Macbeth and King Lear, performed half a dozen monologues.
“The way we specifically do Shakespeare — where it's not just a soliloquy of Macbeth musing to himself about how terrible his life is, it's him basically interrogating the audience and trying to force them to agree with the terrible things that he's done — is really, really fun as an actor,” Pond said.
Tiare Soliai, a high school student who attended the show with her friend, enjoyed the way actors engaged with members of the audience.
“I like how they include the audience,” Soliai said. “I felt like I was part of the show.”
Audience engagement is part of what makes Grassroots stand out, and according to Pond, they’ve been trying to build up audience members and engagement since the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020.
“Once a global pandemic happens, it turns out that people stop coming to live theater,” Pond said. “But we've been getting up to our previous audience numbers, and tonight was our biggest night of this run. It was fantastic having this many groundlings to be able to interact with.”
Grassroots cast member Katherine Moulton agreed that the audience for that night’s show was a highlight.
“A big, rowdy audience to play off of is the best part of a Grassroots show,” Moulton said as she mopped up fake blood between shows. “So that's been awesome, seeing how many people have come out and braved the cold and the blood.”
In addition to her role cleaning up the stage, Moulton played King Lear’s duplicitous oldest daughter, Goneril.
“Being evil in a grassroots show is the most fun an actor can have,” Moulton said. “My favorite part of Lear, since it's for Halloween is — spoiler alert — the eyes getting pulled out. I think it's cool and gross.”
Strong was also keeping an eye out for that gruesome scene.
“The part where his eyes get stabbed out? Fantastic,” Strong said. “Totally tubular.”
After the bloodiest groundling accepted her prize of free merch, audience members trickled out — leaving the cast to strike down the stage and scrub fake blood from the stones.