Scot L. Newstok and Ayanna Thompson, eds. 2009. Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance. New York: Palgrave. $90.00 he. $29.00 sc. 308 pp.Neither readers nor audiences tend to align Macbeth with subject of race. When we situate Shakespeare in context of racial or nationalist discourse, we typically focus on four or five plays, from Titus Andronicus at beginning of his career to The Tempest at end. The other, foreign, subaltern seem not to be topics that belong to most of Shakespeare canon, and less still to Macbeth.Yet when it comes to history of performance, Macbeth has a powerful legacy - particularly in America - of engagement with questions of color and ethnicity. Even Shakespeare scholars are apt to know only scraps of this past, so new collection from Scot L. Newstok and Ayanna Thompson is a welcome addition to scholarship on theatrical history and practice. Weyward Macbeth - anomalous spelling of wayward derives from description of witches in First Folio - attempts to cure amnesia (8) that has erased play's rich, raucous theatrical conversation with African-American and other cultures. Or, as Thompson puts it in her introduction, Weyward Macbeth positions 'Scottish Play' in center of American racial constructions (8). In this goal, book meets with mixed success. But most of contributors do show considerable charge that thinking differently, or highlighting and remembering race, can bring to play.The collection comprises 26 short (roughly 3000 to 5000-word) essays on Macbeth in several contexts. There are treatments of early American performances and parodies (including minstrel shows); Federal Theatre Project's productions (Orson Welles and legacy of his 1936 Voodoo Macbeth); and accounts of Macbeths put on by African-, Asian-, Native-, and Latino-American troupes. There are speculations on non-traditional casting in opera, and readings of Macbeth refractions and adaptations on film, television, internet, and in jazz as well as contemporary African-American poetry and drama. Contributors include actors, directors, and academics - Shakespeareans, Africanists, American historians, Cultural Studies specialists. Newstok and Thompson do well to organize this wildly disparate collection into a readable presentation.Many of authors make Macbeth-race connection through compelling historical data and pithy vignettes, showing (for one example) surprising frequency with which both abolitionists and slaveholders deployed references to play: slaveowners and nation as a whole were like Macbeths with their indelible bloodstains; while slaves and freedmen themselves were also like doomed king in his courage, invincibility, and ultimate subjection to larger forces. But most of authors here exhibit some strain in articulating precisely significance of connection of Macbeth to matters of race. The stellar American actor Harry Lennix contributes a lovely essay, A Black Actor's Guide to Scottish Play, or, Why Macbeth Matters (113-20), and his answers to question why Macbeth? represent an honest, distilled version of difficulty most of authors encounter in one way or another. He begins disarmingly: Africans and their descendants are uniquely empowered to bring a deeper resonance to [Macbeth] because of its interest in metaphysical world. I do not know a black person who does not, on some level, believe in ghosts (115). Indeed, many of racially informed productions discussed in volume highlight, along with collection's title, witchy, uncanny weyward-ness of play; specificity of Lennix's response here makes cultural sense, if we believe him. But his subsequent explanations for Macbeth's appropriateness to work of black actors grow broadly unhelpful or contradictory: No course of action in its direct dramatic line depends upon race; then, he says hopefully, play has the deepest parallels with our everyday realities, both tangible and emotional. …