Eunice Wong, who plays Bougrelas and Lady MacDuff, sent me an excerpt from War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning by the veteran war correspondent Chris Hedges that I would like to share with you:

“Late one night, unable to sleep during the war in El Salvador, I picked up Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It was not a calculated decision. I had come that day from a village where about a dozen people had been murdered by the death squads, their thumbs tied behind their backs with wire and their throats slit.

I had read the play before, but in my other life as a student. A thirst for power at the cost of human life was no longer an abstraction to me. It was part of my universe. I came upon Macduff’s wife’s speech made when the murderers, sent by Macbeth, arrive to kill her and her small children: “Whither should I fly?” she asks,

I have done no harm. But I remember now/

I am in this earthly world – where to do harm/

Is often laudable, to do good sometime/

Accounted dangerous folly.

These words seized me like furies and cried out for the dead I had seen lined up that day in a dusty market square, the dead I have seen since, the dead, including the two thousand children who were killed in Sarajevo. These words cried out for those whom I would see later in unmarked mass graves in Bosnia, Kosova, Iraq, the Sudan, Algeria, El Salvador, the dead who are my own, who carried notebooks, cameras, and a vanquished idealism and sad addiction into war and never returned. Of course resistance is usually folly, of course power exercised with ruthlessness will win, of course force easily snuffs out gentle people, the compassionate, and the decent…

Shakespeare reminds us that though we may not do what we want, we are responsible for our lives. It does not matter what has been made of us; what matters is what we ourselves make of what has been done to us.”

I continue to think about Hedges’ words and his insight into the nature of violence, our inability as societies to stop it and the need in the face of humanity’s darkest crimes to accept accountability for our own lives and actions. I hope that in some way The Polish Play will speak to these same truths.