MacBird!

by Barbara Garson

MacBird! was a notorious 1966 counterculture drama by Barbara Garson satirically depicting President Lyndon Johnson as Macbeth & his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, as Lady Macbeth. The production became a big hit downstairs at the Village Gate on NY's Bleecker St in the '67 season. Coming three years after Kennedy's assassination & before the end of Johnson's presidency, it caused controversy. Starting out as a short satire by a recent graduate of the Berkeley anti-Vietnam war movement, it was developed, with a little help from Shakespeare, into a rousing attack upon the current administration. The play, performed in full costume, flavored with rich Texas & Boston accents, & an attempt at Shakespearean iambic pentameter, begins with the '60 presidential convention, where, with the help of his wife, MacBird hopes to be elected King, but loses to John Ken O'Dunc. By a plot twist, it's revealed that MacBird will become Viceroy, much to the dismay of the Ken O'Dunc clan. Then MacBird comes upon three witches who talk to him in riddles, & who, in his imagination, reveal to him that he will in good time become King. MacBird decides to hasten this prospect & invites the Ken O'Dunc family to his ranch after the coronation. As the day of the visit approaches, his wife, who has been complaining that she always has to do the dirty work, sees a chance for her husband to gain the throne, & agrees to "call the shots" during the visit. A procession through the streets is planned, headed by O'Dunc, his brothers Bobby & Ted, & followed up by the Egg of Head & the Earl of Warren. John is assassinated, & is about to be succeeded by his brother Robert, which causes all sorts of complications. It had a long engagement in LA & became noteworthy because of the future careers of its original cast. MacBird! starred Stacy Keach as MacBird, alongside Rue McClanahan as Lady MacBird. John was played by Paul Hecht, Robert by Wm Devane & John Pleshette played Ted. John Clark, originating the Earl of Warren role, left the cast early to marry Lynn Redgrave, & Cleavon Little's 1st professional job was in the play. The stage manager, Joel Zwick, became an acclaimed movie & tv director.

Genres: Plays, Drama, Politics, Theatre, Fiction, Humor

109 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

Barbara Garson is an American playwright, author and social activist, perhaps best known for the play MacBird. Garson attended the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a B.A. specializing in Classical History in 1964. She was active in the Free Speech Movement, as the editor of The Free Speech Movement Newsletter, which was printed on an offset press that she herself had restored. She was one of 800 arrested on December 2, 1964 at a sit-in at Sproul Hall, Berkeley, following the "Machine Speech" by Mario Savio. In 1968, Garson had a child, Juliet, and in 1969 she went to work at The Shelter Half, an anti-war GI coffee house near Fort Lewis Army base in Tacoma, Washington. In the early 1970s, she moved to Manhattan, publishing short, humorous essays and theater reviews primarily for The Village Voice as well as plays.

Reviews

[Julio The Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Lyndon Johnson performed unnatural acts on the body of John F. Kennedy on the flight from Dallas to Washington, D.C."---Paul Krassner

Once upon a time in America, A.D. 1966, this was the most famous and controversial play in the country. The literati and glitterati rushed to the one off-Broadway theater that dared put it on to be seen and talked about. Particularly delightful was the fact that MacBird! (you must never leave out the exclamation point when discussing this black comedy) came from the pen of an unknown female drama student, Barbara Garson. Performing necrophilia on the body of JFK is about the only crime Garson does not accuse President Lyndon Johnson of committing. In the tradition of post-1960 black humor (Joseph Heller, Terry Southern, Calder Willingham) Garson has revised Shakespeare's tragedy to make it fit the transition from liberal hero to ogre statesman through assassination, led on by Lady MacBird, of course. The reason this otherwise puerile idea works so potently is that Garson shows how usurping the throne of a handsome, charismatic and beloved king ultimately blew up in MacBird's face. What is left unsaid in this play is actually more important than any line in the text. By 1966 most Americans could see that it was liberals, e.g. Adlai Stevenson as "The Egg of Head", not conservatives, who had led the USA into the quagmire of Viet Nam. MacBIRD! is that rare piece of literature that is included in most histories of the Sixties, since it helped galvanize public opinion against Johnson and his war. BTW, ten years later Garson wrote a terrific non-fiction account of low-income work in America, ALL THE LIVE LONG DAY. I do believe I am the only person to have read it, though Barbara is still with us.

[Manny]

My father used to speak fondly of this 60s pastiche, which reworks the story of Macbeth with LBJ as MacBird and JFK as Ken O'Dunc. I was reminded of it just now when I saw Albert Hirschmann quote a speech by the Egg of Head (Adlai Stevenson) in his 1970 Exit, Voice and Loyalty:

In speaking out one loses influence
The chance for change by pleas and prayer is gone.
The chance to modify the devil's deeds
As critic from within is still my hope.
To quit the club! Be outside looking in!
This outsideness, this unfamiliar land,
From which few travellers ever get back in...
I fear to break; I'll work within for change.

[Edward]

“ In 1966 a young Berkeley anti-war activist named Barbara Garson reworked the treachery and regicide of Shakespeare’s Macbeth into a modern day sketch involving the recent death of our own president at the hands of his successor, in which the murderous usurper was finally avenged and slain by the character representing Robert F. Kennedy. MacBird! first appeared in Ramparts, a leading antiwar publication of the Left, and it was soon developed into a play, running for many hundreds of performances in New York City, Los Angeles, and elsewhere despite pressure from the authorities. But that short work of allegorical, almost satirical fiction aimed at Johnson seems to have been very much the exception to the pattern.”
-Ron Unz’ “American Pravda: JFK, LBJ, and Our Great National Shame”, June 24, 2024

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd heard a lot about this play since its first production in New York but didn't get around to reading the thing until finding it for sale in a used edition. Indeed, much of what I read is stuff discovered fortuitously, years after the intent was formed. Excepting cases of necessity, such as an assigned reading for a class, I rarely go out of my way to obtain a title.

Years later, when I was ending my eleventh year as chair of the state affiliate of the Socialist Party, I met the author, Barbara Garson, who, now a middle-aged woman, was running as our candidate for the Vice-Presidency.

While I thought the play quite clever at the time of reading it, a younger person with no memory of the sixties would likely miss much of the satire.

[Ray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Have you ever wondered what a Macbeth parody set in the mid 1960’s with Lyndon B. Johnson as Macbeth would look like??

[Colin Cox · Rating 2 out of 5]

Barbara Garson’s MacBird! is a rousing but ultimately forgettable satire of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. Garson borrows and appropriates scenes and lines from several of Shakespeare’s most celebrated plays (chiefly Macbeth), but the narrative cannot sustain the weight of the play’s conceptual bulk.

MacBird! feels situated in a particular interpretive moment that unfairly blamed Johnson for the United States’ military failure in Vietnam while conveniently ignoring Kennedy’s contributions to that war. Nevertheless, Garson seems to make a deeply thoughtful point about political operatives and dynasticism. Even though Robert appears to unify the Democratic Party at play’s end, his final line is a pledge or promise that sounds glaringly suspect: “So, choked with grief, I pledge my solemn word / To lift aloft the banner of MacBird.” This line functions not unlike a campaign speech, which, to some degree, it is. This inability to distinguish between sentiment and rhetoric is decidedly Shakespearean (think Hamlet in particular) and functions as a reminder to the reader that unity is too often a contrivance. This, however, should not be too surprising since Robert’s heart, like that of his brothers', was “cut away” to free them from “paralyzing scruples,” an appropriation of Macduff’s “untimely ripped” which casts the Kennedys as detached operatives.

[Mxj · Rating 4 out of 5]

I adore this book so much it's incredible
I'm already a big fan of MacBeth, and when i found out about Mac Bird i was really intrigued
Even though it's shorter than Shakespeare work, you can find a lot of references and easter eggs - but, this is still something different, with a story and way of writing that won't let you down
I don't really think you need to know MacBeth very well or to have already read it to understand and line Mac Bird, but this is definitely a plus and will help you appreciate this story more

[Tyler Marsolais · Rating 3 out of 5]

Probably funnier if I knew the politicians

[Phillip · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this for Banned Books Week 2013.

What I enjoy about this play is the seemingly haphazard appropriation of lines from multiple Shakespeare plays, which I always find an interesting technique. Though it doesn't seem like Garson is particularly concerned with appropriating lines in any systematic or purposeful way--for instance, while there are sections that seem to link Bobby with Hamlet (another famous, if problematic, revenger), but then MacBird also gets some of Hamlet's lines.

In terms of the play's purpose, it feels really narrow and severely dated. I mean, my sense is that few people today hate LBJ as vehemently as Garson seems to, and although JFK is still a kind of culture hero, we also know that he wasn't as much of an angel as he might have seemed at the time. Partially I think my dislike for this play is because I feel like LBJ got unfairly blamed for the Vietnam conflict, when really Kennedy had begun US involvement, and I do think LBJ's Great Society program would have been good for the country if not for the war destroying his credibility. Basically, I feel this play is really unfair to LBJ.
However, I did actually like the end of the play when Bobby seems to turn. He gives a fairly absurd explanation that Joe Kennedy had had his sons' hearts and blood removed and replaced with machinery to make them better leaders--suggesting that Bobby Kennedy, for as much as he's the hero of the play, will perhaps not be a substantively different leader than MacBird. This impression is bolstered when, in the last two lines of the play he pledges his solemn word "to lift aloft the banner of MacBird" (III.vi). I'm not sure what we're supposed to make of this ending, but my cynical 2013 position suggests that Bobby is no longer the hero of the play, but is poised to become another tyrannical leader in the vein of MacBird.

[Gabrielle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this play when I was 13; it was part of a gift of books my father gave me during a visit ( Five Smooth Stones was one, and The Harrad Experiment was another--both relics of the Sixties). Barbara Garson, now in her sixties, is still an anti-war activist and playwright; her plays since MacBird haven't enjoyed half the same box office appeal. Yet this satire stirred up a lot of controversy in its time, especially at the height of the Vietnam War and urban unrest. Of course, it's based on Shakespeare's MacBeth and suggests that MacBird (a thinly-veiled Lyndon Johnson) and his wife Lady MacBird (Claudia Alta "Lady Bird" Johnson) may have have had a hand in John Ken O'Dunc (John F. Kennedy)'s assassination, thus usurping the crown away from his brother Robert, eventually throwing the country into chaos. (Some conspiracy theorists have maintained that Johnson was also complicit in the Kennedy assassination; by airing her doubts about the veracity of the Warren Report, Garson was merely echoing what many Americans felt about its conclusions.) It may be dated, and the jokes may sometimes prove unfathomable to a younger audience not 'in the know,' but it's quite a romp and a read.

[Peter J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this at a used bookstore. Since Macbeth is my personal favorite Shakespeare work and, like most people, i would imagine, I went through a period of time fascinated with the Kennedy Assassination, this immediately became something I needed to check out.

As an overall work, and like most satire in general, this would be stronger viewed in period. 50 Years years later, some of the bite feels diminished. Also, with the perspective of history, we have knowledge that Garson couldn't have when writing. (Perhaps nothing looms larger the fate of Robert Kennedy.)

Having said that, the play (which I found was revived a few years ago - which might have been something to see) is worth the peruse to students of history, satire or Macbeth fans.

[David Elliott · Rating 4 out of 5]

A classic work of 1960s political theater, originally intended to be no more than a one-off demonstration sketch. Advised to flesh out the sketch into a full-length parody of MacBeth, activist-playwright Barbara Garson ended up with Off Broadway's biggest hit of the year. Potentially useful as a model for playwrights at this turbulent time in American social life. The parody preserves the broad outlines of Shakespeare, and plays competently with verse forms. Set in the aftermath of the assassination of JFK, some familiarity with political figures of the time would be helpful, but not essential. Could be fun to get some friends together for an evening of cathartic, participatory satire!