Early Modern Theatre as Therapeutical Archive: Barry, Stephan Wolfter's 'Cry Havoc!,' and Shakespeare's Macbeth

In the American black comedy television series Barry (HBO, 2018-2023), the eponymous hero is a traumatized U.S. marine veteran of the war in Afghanistan who, upon returning home to the United States, has become a contract killer. By accident, Barry stumbles into an acting class, learns to express his feelings and attempts to abandon his murderous lifestyle. Shakespeare’s Macbeth functions as a key element in Barry’s (often satirically inflected) progress towards gradual psychological liberation. In this paper, I will combine a reading of Barry as a Macbeth adaptation with an analysis of the use of Shakespeare in trauma therapy for U.S. military veterans by the organization Decruit. Decruit was founded by army veteran cum actor-director Stephan Wolfert. Wolfert promotes his programs through his one-man play Cry Havoc!, which tells Wolfert’s story of working through his own post-traumatic stress disorder by means of the adaptation of multiple Shakespeare plays, many of which feature war veterans. In this paper, I will triangulate a reading of Barry as war trauma narrative through the series’ resonances with Macbeth via Cry Havoc!. I will suggest that Barry, Cry Havoc! and even Macbeth itself attest to the power of early modern theatre to effect profound changes in the people who perform and witness it, and thus allows us to think of the early modern theatre as an archive of therapeutic possibilities.