While Macbeth Played, Shots Rang Out
A night at the theater echoed an assassination attempt just miles away.
Cries tore through the capital on Saturday night. Murder! Horror!
At the Folger Theatre, Adjoa Andoh played Lady Macbeth in her riveting version of Shakespeare’s most terrifying tragedy.
We didn’t know it as we gripped the armrests, but Andoh’s one-night-only production was echoing events taking place simultaneously just three miles away.
After Macbeth, played by John Douglas Thompson, strutted and fretted his hour upon the stage, we blinked in the harsh house lights and reached for our phones. A little Candy Crush, a text from a friend — anything to brush away the gloom of the Scottish play.
It was only then that we learned what chaos had erupted at the Washington Hilton.
We should have known. After all, we’d heard the prophecy from one of the Weird Sisters.
Shortly before a gunman rushed a security checkpoint inside the hotel, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt had said, “There will be some shots fired tonight in the room.”
Double, double toil and trouble, indeed.
Andoh staged her production at the Folger to honor the 90th anniversary of an all-Black Macbeth funded by the Federal Theatre Project and directed by a 20-year-old Orson Welles. But commemoration gave way to coincidence.
While we were watching the unhinged banquet scene in Macbeth’s castle, guests in the Hilton dining room were diving under the tables wondering if their leader was okay.
After the show, walking out into the damp, unruly night, I joined a cluster of displaced party guests. The surreal city, drunk on a cocktail of panic and revelry, was crisscrossed by yellow police tape. Armed officers barked at revelers in tuxedos and shockingly bright gowns. One woman was riding a scooter encrusted with rhinestones. Some were trying to reach their hotels; others wandered in search of another satellite party for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
My wife, seeing the news, started texting me to come home now. But I was still drifting around haunted by Macduff’s words:
O nation miserable,
With an untitled tyrant bloody-sceptered,
When shalt thou see thy wholesome days again?
A presidential assassination attempt might inspire a healthy body politic to reflect on the prevalence of violence, the proliferation of guns, and the neglect of mental health.
But Saturday night at the White House, Trump was already busy exploiting the terror to secure his absurd ballroom. The next day, Lady Melania demanded the head of a TV comedian. Wednesday, the Justice Dept., straining under the weight of the president’s obsession, indicted former FBI Director James Comey for posting a threatening photo of seashells on Instagram.
It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Comparisons between Trump and Macbeth have grown more common than puns in the First Folio. The boundless ambition, the absence of remorse, the relentless pursuit of perceived enemies — any of those pathological tendencies is sharp enough to hang a column on.
But such facile character analysis — which I’ve been guilty of myself — flatters the Very Stable Genius by ascribing to him the kind of conflicted conscience that Shakespeare placed even in his most ghastly tragic heroes.
The real similarity, I realized in the pandemonium of Saturday night, lies in the realms these two leaders have abused and spoiled. A government turned wholly to the pursuit of one man’s ravenous ambition — to the exclusion of law, logic, and decency — becomes, as Shakespeare notes in Macbeth, a poor country “where violent sorrow seems a modern ecstasy,” a place where “renown and grace is dead.”
The difference, of course, is that we know Macbeth, for all its savagery, will finally end with the restitution of order. But America is still stuck in the third act of this tragedy, and we can’t know if the author is William Shakespeare or Samuel Beckett.◆
The rest of the newsletter follows below.
Books Go to the Movies:
The Devil Wears Prada 2, starring Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway, walks down the runway today in theaters. Somehow it’s been 20 years since the first movie, which was based on Lauren Weisberger’s 2003 novel about the travails of working for a thinly veiled version of Vogue editor Anna Wintour. The new movie is an adaptation of Weisberger’s 2013 sequel, Revenge Wears Prada: The Devil Returns.
Only slightly more frightening than the New York fashion world, Lord of the Flies starts streaming May 4 on Netflix (trailer). The four-episode series is adapted from William Golding’s classic novel by Jack Thorne, who also wrote the Emmy Award-winning series Adolescence. When I was teaching freshmen, Lord of the Flies was handy for explaining themes and symbols, but I eventually regarded it as intolerably cynical and misanthropic.
An animated adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm opens today in theaters (trailer). Seth Rogen, Glenn Close, Woody Harrelson, and other popular stars provide voices for Napoleon, Snowball, and their barnyard constituents. The timing seems perfect for this incisive political allegory, but reviews of Andy Serkis’s production suggest it’s destined for the slaughterhouse. All adaptations are equal; some are more equal than others.◆
Game Night
Last weekend, my wife and three friends from college gathered at our house for their annual Wild Women’s Weekend. (The title is ironic. The wildest thing they did was skip church on Sunday morning.)
Out-and-about activities included visiting the African American Museum and Planet Word (both a hit).
I tried to stay out of their way, but before they dispersed back to various corners of the country, I prevailed on them to play a new literary game called Prose & Cons, developed by Micki Myers.
The box comes with 60 character cards drawn from famous stories and 240 description cards laced with silly, hip phrases.
The Editor lays down one character card face up, and then each player selects a description card that fits best (or most hilariously).
For instance, my wife, Dawn, picked Jay Gatsby.
Then, we anonymously submitted the following:
Has champagne taste on a beer budget
Breaking up is hard to do
Has a girl crush
Avoids the poors
Has a bad case of FOMO
Dawn chose — and justified — the description card she liked best, and then the next player became the Editor.
No matter who the character was — Dracula, Willy Wonka, Elizabeth Bennet — one of the cards in our hands always seemed apropos, or didn’t, which was even funnier.
It’s simple, elegant bookish fun, and since all of us are former or current educators, we took to it like teachers to fresh chalk (details).◆
Zhuzh It Up
The Pulitzer Prize-winning dance critic Sarah Kaufman knows how to write about movement. She also knows how to make her writing move.
Dawn and I never missed her pieces when she worked at The Washington Post. Now she’s published Verb Your Enthusiasm: How to Master the Art of the Verb and Transform Your Writing.
Packed with examples from Virginia Woolf, Sally Rooney, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and many others, this book rolls up its sleeves and tunes the engine of your sentences.
(Know someone graduating this month? You’re welcome.)
Individual chapters cover subjects your English teacher may have covered before you were ready to hear. Sarah’s approach — personable, smart, and, yes, enthusiastic — offers a masterclass you can take at your own pace.
The passive voice is covered.
Among her many tips, she suggests going on an adverb diet. Writers may crave those empty calories, but their prose doesn’t need them.
I love Kaufman’s insistence that mechanics alone won’t make angels sing. Replacing every “to be” verb with an active verb might muscle up your work a bit. But to activate your writing, you’ve got to sharpen your attention and deepen your feeling. It helps, she notes, to have been chased by an alligator.
Each chapter ends with “good habits” that writers should adopt — and clear exercises that English teachers should steal.
There’s a witty and wise chapter about new verbs, which opens with The Washington Post’s legendary editor Ben Bradlee asking Kaufman, “Where do you summah?”
“As you open yourself to your passions and enthusiasms,” she writes near the end, “lock onto the power and subtleties of verbs to bring that deep essence into being.” That will propel your prose to new places, no matter where you summah.◆
Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam
A country without a language is a country without a soul.
For more than 300 years, the Irish fought to keep their language alive under a sometimes deadly mix of political, economic, and cultural pressures.
The story of their survival is told in a new exhibition at the Grolier Club in New York.
Risings: The Irish Literary Revival and the Making of a Nation, organized with The New York Public Library, features rare books, letters, political tracts, and photographs that represent the fight for Irish nationhood through its literary expression.
The show includes W.B. Yeats’s The Wanderings of Oisin (1889), his handwritten manuscript of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (1890), and an inscribed first edition of J.M. Synge’s play The Playboy of the Western World (1907).
There’s also a newly discovered copy of a poster designed by the women’s nationalist movement to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Easter Rising.
A 1915 photograph shows Constance Markievicz, the Irish revolutionary nationalist who played a leading role in the Easter Rising. The curators note that “when her death sentence was commuted by the British, she said, ‘I do wish your lot had the decency to shoot me.’” From prison, she was elected to the British House of Commons. (I now want to know everything about her.)
Other sections of the exhibit feature newspaper coverage of Michael Collins’s killing in 1922, works by James Joyce, and books by contemporary writers such as Seamus Heaney, Roddy Doyle, Sally Rooney, and Claire Keegan.
Related lectures include Colm Tóibín on The Irish Literary Renaissance (May 4) and Paul Muldoon and Kevin Young on Irish poetry (May 18).
This free exhibit runs through July 25 (details).◆
Literary Prizes and Honors
The Big Empty, the 20th book in Robert Crais’s Elvis Cole/Joe Pike series, won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel from the Mystery Writers of America (full list of winners).
All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now, by Ruby Tandoh, a work of cultural history about how modern life shapes our diets, won the Food Book prize at the Fortnum & Mason Food and Drink Awards ceremony last night in London (full list).
The Bible Recap for Kids: A 365-Day Guide through the Bible for Young Readers, by Tara-Leigh Cobble, was named the Christian Book of the Year by the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (full list).◆
Picture This
I once thought the morning arguments over our younger daughter’s hair or her homework or her skirt would blow the windows out.
The yelling! The crying!
My wife and daughter would drive off in such a pitched battle that I felt certain one of them wouldn’t come back that evening.
But by the time they got home, they were always giggling, telling each other funny stories. Whenever I asked about the morning’s blowup, neither of them could even remember it.
Julie Fogliano’s Because of a Shoe captures that effervescent rage with just the right notes of humor and understanding (ages 2-5).
The story, told in one long, breathless sentence that’s great fun to read aloud, follows a little girl refusing to put on her shoe — “a too-tight shoe, a too-loose shoe.”
“You are screaming,” Fogliano writes, “and you don’t want to be screaming but you just can’t stop screaming.” The girl is unreasonable! Inconsolable! Exasperating!
Mom loses her cool: “I don’t want to be loud and yelling but I just can’t stop being loud and yelling.”
But then the thunderstorm passes, and the book concludes with a gentle landing: “You are still you (funny sweet you) and I am still me (funny sweet me) and we are not a shoe.”
Marla Frazee’s illustrations, shifting from gentle tones to ominous black-and-white, sweep us along this hilariously overblown battle of wills until we reach a happy hug — and one final, witty cast-off shoe.◆
This Week’s Poem
Arthur Sze is the first U.S. Poet Laureate to focus on the art of translation. In his new book, Transient Worlds, he claims, “Translation is the deepest form of reading.”
Last night at the Library of Congress, Sze spoke with U.K. Poet Laureate Simon Armitage about his new translation of Gilgamesh, the Mesopotamian epic composed 4,000 years ago (video).
In this passage, Humbaba, the monstrous guardian of the Cedar Forest, pleads for mercy from Gilgamesh, who has overpowered him. The scene marks a crucial moment in the education of a king:
“A corpse never served his master well
but a living slave brings profit to his lord.
Show compassion, Gilgamesh, and save me from death.
Let me go on living to answer your wishes:
all the lumber you ask for I will happily fell;
for you I will guard the incense trees.
Your palace will be proud of my gifts of timber.”
Enkidu addressed his comrade Gilgamesh:
“My friend, don’t be swayed by Humbaba’s words,
his supplications will soften your mind.
If you free him now our lives will be erased.
He will lash us to a tree in the Cedar Forest,
he will put on his seven cloaks of protection.”
Excerpted from Gilgamesh: A New Verse Translation. Copyright © 2026 by Simon Armitage. Used with permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
P.S. The Center for the Art of Translation wants to raise $17 million to open a literary hub in San Francisco in 2027. The three-story building will include the West Coast’s only bookstore dedicated to translated literature for readers of all ages, along with space for translation workshops, after-school programs, and the indie publisher Two Lines Press (details).◆
May Day/Mayday
Since Feb. 4, I’ve been working in a liminal realm — laid off from The Washington Post and barred from the newsroom but still using the company email and somehow not quite gone.
In the latter days, I downloaded old messages, copied contacts I might need, and pestered HR with last-minute questions. It felt a bit like packing for a one-way voyage, lackadaisical at first, then panicked.
Yesterday, April 30, the horn blew, and the last threads connecting me to the paper where I worked for 21 years were cut.
A few of you have mentioned that my work seems freer, bolder even, since I cast off on my own. I’m not sure that’s true, but it’s tricky to hear one’s voice objectively. I can say, though, that I never felt constrained while working at The Post. Waves from the rightward turn on the Editorial Board never washed up against my little dinghy in Book World.
The position I held, the talented folks who worked there, and the audience the section drew created, for a time, a genuinely rewarding place.
But the times they are a-changin’, as some Nobel Laureate in Literature once said.
No, this is not the way I imagined 2026 playing out. A year ago, I thought a Substack was a smaller pile of books.
But given the support I’ve received from all of you, I feel only gratitude. Onward. This dinghy’s got new oars, and I’m putting my back into it.◆
Clippings
This week’s book review is Ghost Town, a moving novel by Tom Perrotta about the year that shattered a boy’s life (review).
This summer Oprah is moving her 30-year-old book club — along with The Oprah Podcast — to Amazon, which will distribute Oprah’s content on Prime Video, Amazon Music, Fire TV, and Audible.
Queen Camilla presented the New York Public Library with a new Roo to join its collection of Winnie-the-Pooh stuffed animals that once belonged to Christopher Robin Milne.◆
If you’d like to keep independent book coverage like this alive, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It really helps.
Your piece about the play and the WHCD is fabulous, with perfect quotes illustrating it. I love reading writing like this!
The powers at The Post were fools to let you and Book World go.