Shadow puppets and revenge: Manual Cinema’s new take on ‘Macbeth’

Fifteen years ago, artist Julia Miller found an old overhead projector in her landlord’s garage. After dusting it off, she got an idea: What if she pulled together some of her most creative friends in community theater and music to put on a shadow puppet production? 

After performing a 20-minute show in a storefront theater festival in Chicago, people asked them when their next performance would be. They didn’t have any plans but kept making work together. Soon, the cinematic shadow puppetry and music company Manual Cinema was born. 

“None of us really saw it as a vocation in the beginning,” said Drew Dir, one of Manual Cinema’s five co-artistic directors. “But now this is what we all do for a living.” 

The work they do is highly specialized and time-intensive. Each production includes hundreds of shadow puppets, most of them cut out of paper and cardstock by hand. They tell stories, usually without dialog, of all kinds — from an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to a version of the Dickens classic A Christmas Carol — with puppeteers moving figures and slides across the screen while musicians perform a live original score. “It’s a little bit like watching a silent animated film performed in front of you,” said Dir. 

On Nov. 22, Cal Performances is presenting Manual Cinema’s newest work, The 4th Witch. Written and directed by Dir, The 4th Witch is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It follows Esme, a young girl who loses her parents during wartime and is apprenticed by the three witches from the original play. As the girl amasses power through witchcraft, she vows to take revenge on the one responsible for her parents’ death: Macbeth. 

Co-commissioned by Cal Performances, The 4th Witch is part of Illuminations, a multiyear initiative that explores the intersection of the arts and major contemporary issues through interdisciplinary campus lectures and discussions. This year’s theme is “Exile and Sanctuary.” After the event, Berkeley Professor Shannon Jackson will join members of Manual Cinema for a post-production conversation. 

In this interview, UC Berkeley News talks with Dir about his love of revenge tragedies, how silent puppetry can distill a story into its “core gut matter” and why audiences crave lo-fi productions now more than ever. 

UC Berkeley News: You started Manual Cinema in 2010, and the production company went on to win an Emmy in 2017 for a video project titled “The Forger,” created in collaboration with The New York Times, for which it was also nominated for a Peabody Award. Why do you think your handmade approach resonates with audiences? 

Drew Dir: As so much of our lives are moving over into the digital space, it feels more and more important to have these experiences where it’s a few people in a room, creating something together for an audience purely by hand, without the intervention of computers or social media. I think that’s why the work remains sustaining for us and why audiences continue to gravitate towards it. It’s so unlike anything we experience in our daily lives, having this imagery created for you, not mediated through a digital screen but by other human beings in the room with you.

You are the lead writer and director of The 4th Witch, which follows a war-orphaned girl’s journey with Macbeth’s three witches. Why did you decide to tell a kind of inversion of the original play? 

It came out of a great love of the play and its world. I’m a former English major and my concentration was in Renaissance drama, so I love Shakespeare. I love all the weird revenge tragedies. People have told us over the years that we should do a Shakespeare play, and I began to wonder if there was a way to do a play that was like a back door into Shakespeare by focusing on a minor character. That way you would have the freedom to not follow the Shakespearean verse, and instead tell a story that’s in between the lines of the play. 

In Macbeth, three witches deliver prophecies that set the entire plot in motion. In The 4th Witch, Esme escapes into the woods, where she finds refuge with these witches and joins their collective. What about the witches’ storyline in Macbeth appealed to you? 

In the play, you don’t know whose side they’re on. They’re playful, but they seem to have an agenda. You’re not sure if they’re helping Macbeth to seize the throne or laying the path to his downfall. I really wanted to preserve that and not try to come to an answer, like these witches actually were good and trying to help Scotland or that they were beings of evil, but to try to honor the ambiguity that Shakespeare had put in there. 

This year’s Illuminations theme is “Exile and Sanctuary.” Why did you have the girl find sanctuary with the witches? 

I was really interested in telling a story about someone who loses their innocence and comes into a greater, more complicated understanding of the world; someone who acquires power, but in a way that complicates her and is morally ambiguous. I really liked the idea of a character who might be exiled, finds what looks or feels like a sanctuary, and then discovers that that sanctuary is compromised or morally complicated. It’s not what she expected in a way that mirrors a child’s experience of becoming an adult. 

She also didn’t have a choice, right? That was the sanctuary she had, for better or worse. 

That’s exactly right.

How do you think silent storytelling and these kinds of theater technologies can help the audience connect to a narrative in ways that a more traditional play might not? 

A lot of audience members describe seeing a Manual Cinema show as like experiencing a dream. I think there’s this feeling of without language, you distill a story into its core gut matter. It’s a really good medium for illustrating really basic experiences of human emotion, like losing or gaining power, in the same way that other non-verbal media forms do, like commedia dell’arte or dance. They can express fundamental truths through the movement of bodies and the relationship between the characters, and I think shadow is really good at that. 

There is something about the medium — and it’s why I’ve been working in it so long — that works on you in an emotional way that even I can’t totally understand or articulate. Maybe something about it turns people into children again. From childhood, everyone has a relationship with their shadow hands, making shadows on the walls or playing with your shadow. I think that something about seeing this work does make people open and vulnerable.