You can learn a lot about Carls by watching them work.
Catherine Justice’s best-laid plans for 2020 were upended by a global pandemic. Yet rather than curl up on her couch with a chocolate cake and a Netflix account, Justice ’98 sought creative solutions to barriers the pandemic introduced. In addition to her work as an integrative physical therapist at Hennepin Healthcare, Justice is mom to three kids, a yoga instructor, and co–artistic director of the Rough Magic Performance Company, a Twin Cities–based theater company dedicated to telling women’s stories and supporting women artists.
In the past, Rough Magic has staged all-female adaptations of Shakespeare for the Minnesota Fringe Festival. They planned to skip the Fringe Festival in 2020 in favor of a main stage production in the fall. That didn’t happen, of course, but the company still wanted to create something. Justice had been listening to podcasts from the Public Theater in New York, which produces Shakespeare in the Park. “That got me thinking about the adaptations we’ve done and that we could do a podcast version,” she says. “We chose a feminist take on Macbeth— looking at witches, evil, power, corruption, and tyranny—because we wanted to release it near Halloween and the election, and it felt very relevant.”
The actors, director, and sound designer began meeting over Zoom to rehearse and to determine how to record the podcast. Working with downloaded software, the cast members created their own makeshift recording studios. Most people opted for converted closets, but one intrepid actor built a blanket fort to mute the sound around her. “We recorded our own tracks separately, but we stayed on Zoom so we could interact with one another,” says Justice. “Several times we had to stop recording because a cat or a kid would be trying to get into the closet, but we figured out how to work around the interruptions. We sent our tracks to the sound designer and she mixed it all together.”
The Macbeth Project podcast received favorable reviews from audience members and write-ups in the Star Tribune and Minnesota Monthly magazine. It’s available on Apple, Spotify, and Sound Cloud, and via a link on the company’s website (roughmagicperformance.org). The company is working on their next podcast, though this time they’re leaning toward producing a play that is still female-focused, but more contemporary and light.
“We want to do something hopeful and joyful because that’s what we need to get through this pandemic winter,” says Justice. “The country is moving in a better direction now, and we want to reflect that by producing something playful and fun as a little bit of escapism.”
