Arts Alive! podcast: Roxanne Fay, ‘Thrice to Mine’
The bay area’s most distinguished – and chameleonic – actor is today’s guest on the Arts Alive! podcast. Roxanne Fay is onstage at the Straz Center’s Shimberg Playhouse in a Jobsite Theater production of the one-woman show Thrice To Mine.
Fay wrote the play as artist-in-residence at Hawthornden Castle in Lasswade, Scotland. Her character is Gruoch, who lived in the 11th century in the Kingdom of Alba, what would come to be known as Scotland.
Gruoch’s story parallels, to an extent, that of the fictitious character Lady Macbeth, created by William Shakespeare some 500 years later. She was, in fact, the wife of MacBethad mac Findlaích, the troubled King of the Scots. The real Lady Macbeth.
Thrice to Mine – the phrase is part of the incantation from the three witches in Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth – recalls true history, as much as is known about the woman, peppered in with certain elements of the Bard’s re-dreaming of that period of uncertainty, war and bloodletting. It is compelling storytelling.
Fay’s Gruoch speaks in plain English, not the iambic pentameter of Shakespearean dialogue.
This week’s podcast was done via Zoom.