Lady Macbeth as rockstar — Guthrie opens 'Macbeth' with Kiss the Tiger frontwoman
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Sitting in a room at the Guthrie Theater overlooking the Mississippi River, Meghan Kreidler says she relates to Lady Macbeth, a driving force of ambition and cunning in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.”
“In terms of her intensity and her ambition,” Kreidler says. “What ends will you go to to get what you want?”
Not scheming for regicide like Lady Macbeth, Kreidler clarifies, laughing, but:
“I felt that in my professional life, wanting to push myself to achieve certain things, but then feeling a lot of inner conflict about what I have to do in order to have success or get what I want,” says Kreidler, who also fronts the Minneapolis rock band Kiss the Tiger.
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Lady Macbeth is “terrible, but she is sort of magnificent in her awfulness.”
Kreidler is playing Lady Macbeth in the Guthrie Theater production of “Macbeth,” which runs through March 22. The play follows Macbeth, a Scottish general, pursuing the crown at all costs after three witches share a premonition that he will be King of Scotland.
It’s the first time the Guthrie has mounted “The Scottish Play” in more than a decade. Former Guthrie artistic director Joe Dowling directs, and Daniel José Molina, who appeared in Shakespeare’s “The History Plays” at the Guthrie in 2024, stars as the titular character.
For many, Kreidler is best known for Kiss the Tiger, but she has a deep theater background and a relationship with Shakespeare and “Macbeth” that goes back decades.
She's appeared in "As You Like It" and "A Christmas Carol" at the Guthrie, "Flower Drum Song" and "Hot Asian Doctor Husband" at Theater Mu and "Vietgone" at Mixed Blood Theatre, among other roles.
In 2013, she received a BFA in acting from the University of Minnesota; in a sophomore Shakespeare course, Kreidler was assigned a Lady Macbeth monologue.
“That was kind of like my first taste of Lady Macbeth,” she says. That same year, Kreidler saw Michelle O'Neill play Lady Macbeth in a production also directed by Dowling. (O’Neill is also in the current production in the roles of Ross and an Apparition.)
“I have this long history with it personally and an attachment to it, and I've always felt really drawn to this character, and feel like I was made to play it a little bit,” Kreidler says.
In the lead up to “Macbeth” — a play about power, corruption and paranoia — Kreidler says she’s been thinking about what’s happening politically in Minnesota and the country.
“There are a lot of parallels with the world that we're living in right now and with our current leadership, or lack thereof, in this country, and how tyranny can just bleed into an entire country and affect everybody,” she says.
Even though Macbeth is one of Kreidler’s favorite plays, she’s had some ambivalence about Shakespeare.
“I've felt in more recent years like, Why? Why are we doing this? Let's move on. It's old,” Kreidler says. “But now that I've been revisiting it, I'm enamored with the language and the rigor that it takes to perform Shakespeare.”
Kreidler adds: “I've always felt like rock and roll and Shakespeare and heightened classical text have a lot of similarities with one another, just the energy and the attention that it takes to perform in both arenas, but with this play in particular.”
