Acting in the Night: Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War

What can the performance of a single play on one specific night tell us about the world this event inhabited so briefly? Alexander Nemerov takes a performance of *Macbeth* in Washington, DC on October 17, 1863-with Abraham Lincoln in attendance-to explore this question and illuminate American art, politics, technology, and life as it was being lived. Nemerov's inspiration is Wallace Stevens and his poem "Anecdote of the Jar," in which a single object organizes the wilderness around it in the consciousness of the poet. For Nemerov, that evening's performance of *Macbeth* reached across the tragedy of civil war to acknowledge the horrors and emptiness of a world it tried and ultimately failed to change.