Paper Witches, Manual Cinema Builds Its Macbeth Film Live at NYU Skirball

The movie does not exist until you sit down. Then a few people in the dark start making it.

Tonight at 7:30, Manual Cinema opens The 4th Witch at NYU Skirball, 566 LaGuardia Place. It is theater, and it is also a film shoot, and the shoot happens in front of you. Performers work shadow puppets, silhouettes and paper sets while the finished picture assembles on a screen above the stage. The score is played live.

A Story Where Shakespeare Stops

The title points at Macbeth, but the play is where this story begins rather than ends. Skirball describes a retelling that starts where Shakespeare finishes, with a girl who loses her home and family to war.

The company's own site fills in the rest. The girl flees into a dark forest after the warlord Macbeth invades, is taken in by a witch and becomes consumed by revenge against him. Manual Cinema calls it an inversion of the play, a work about grief, war and the cycles of violence. There is no dialogue.

That silence is the point. The audience reads faces, shadows and light, which is how silent film worked and how the best of it still works.

How the Trick Is Done

The effect depends on old tools. WBUR critic Jacquinn Sinclair, reviewing the production at ArtsEmerson in Boston last fall, described vintage overhead projectors and transparencies of the sort that once filled classrooms. The finished film plays above while the performers work in plain view below.

"Though there's no dialogue in this 65-minute offering, you certainly don't miss it." Jacquinn Sinclair, WBUR

Sinclair wrote that the girl's need for revenge "swells until there's not much space for anything else," and asked what it costs "the mind and soul." The method suits the subject. Every shadow is something a person had to place, and every cut is something a hand had to make.

The Boston run played the Emerson Paramount Center's Robert J. Orchard Stage. In New York, the same projectors and paper move to a room at the edge of Washington Square.

Who Made It

Drew Dir conceived and directs, and devised the piece with Sarah Fornace and Julia Miller. Dir also drew the storyboards and designed the puppets. Ben Kauffman and Kyle Vegter wrote the original score and sound design. David Goodman-Edberg designs the lighting, Sully Ratke the costumes and wigs, and Miller made the silhouette masks. Laura Colby is the creative producer.

On stage, Lizi Breit, Leah Casey, Fornace, Miller and Jeffrey Paschal are the puppeteers, with Paschal as the soldier who becomes Macbeth. Erica Kremer on cello, Lucy Little on violin and Alicia Walter on piano and lead vocals make up the band.

The production premiered in June 2025 at Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston. Spoleto, Cal Performances, ArtsEmerson and the Wisconsin Union Theater co-commissioned it, according to the company.

The press quotes gathered on Manual Cinema's site are warm. Laura Collins-Hughes of The New York Times called it "a dark work, full of pain and loss, but the darkness lifts." Don Aucoin of The Boston Globe wrote, "You have the sensation that you're seeing art in the process of being born." Those are the company's chosen excerpts, so read them as a trailer. They do line up with the WBUR notice.

What to Know Before You Go

Performances are tonight, Thursday, October 15, at 7:30 p.m., Friday, October 16, at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday, October 17, at 3 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Skirball lists tickets at $60 to $100. The show runs 65 minutes. It is recommended for ages 12 and up and includes loud sounds and flashing lights.

For another wordless-leaning downtown opening this month, this one an experimental opera in Brooklyn, see our look at A Deity of Nothing at BAM.

Three nights, four shows, one witch. After Saturday the paper goes back in the box.