This Ends in Blood

Play is the Thing in Teen-centric
Macbeth Adaptation for High Schoolers

Signature In the Schools, Signature Theatre, Arlington, Virginia
Monday, January 19, 2026, C-411 (lower corner of bleachers on one side of square, box theater)
Streaming September 18–28. 2026
Directed by David Zobell

Playwright Dani Stoller's This Ends in Blood transplants William Shakespeare's Macbeth to the realm of current-day high school football. Shakespeare's King Duncan and his thanes are a quarterback and his teammates plus Banquo, the equipment manager. In their company are their cheerleaders, including Mac's girlfriend, Beth. The witches are a clique of goths who hail Mac as third receiver, as first receiver, and as the quarterback! All of these teens are played by teens at Signature Theatre in Arlington, Virginia.

Don't shake your head in Shakespurity disdain. The production, which had only two public performances (plus five for public school groups) was one of the richest nights of theater I've ever experienced. And it's back, streaming on Signature's website through September 28 (https://www.sigtheatre.org).

The play's success starts with Stoller's clever script, translating Macbeth's culture and imagery into high school life. As important is Stoller's skills in conceptual comedy, which hitherto I've seen only in her stage performances. For This Ends in Blood, Stoller's comic instincts not only mines Shakespeare's own comic touches in Macbeth, it also creates a natural throughline of ironic comic moments. And still, the play's tragedy is real: there is blood, there is self harm.

Meanwhile, the underpinning foundation of that tragedy is the all-too-real stressors current generations of kids have to deal with. This adds an intriguing angle to Stoller's portrayal of Shakespeare's Macbeths. I've seen Macbeth and his lady portrayed in a variety of moods and motivations, from raw ambition and evil souls to painful pasts and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This is the first time I've seen them depicted as social laggers, his mediocrity inciting abuse from his businessman father, her family status leaving her stuck at the bottom of the social pyramid. That ain't Shakespeare, you say? Give me a moment, and give these kids a chance.

The success of This Ends in Blood relies most on how the cast of teens produce and perform the play written for them—in their language (mostly). The acting company comprises 30 students and the production company 14 students from 12 high schools in the region. They are seniors, juniors, sophomores, and freshmen drawn from English, social studies, and theater classes. The acting company has one adult (who doubles as Mac's father and the rival school's coach), and overseeing it all are 14 members of the "Adult Production Team," including the play's director, David Zobell, Signature Theatre's education director. What the audience gets is a full-on professional-quality production of an original play with teenagers doing much of the work backstage and 98 percent of the performance on stage.

This Ends in Blood is the Signature in the Schools program's 31st productions and could be a model for all theaters that want to grow ongoing generations of theater practitioners and audiences. See the Aside below for a summary of the Signature in the Schools program.

The production process starts with Zobell and Stoller soliciting students and schools on subject matter. They glean their ideas from the Arlington Public Schools social studies and English high school curricula, looking for a topic they feel is presently relevant that they then begin researching and writing. Two words in that description are key to last year's choice of Macbeth and Stoller's approach to Shakespeare's script; those words are social studies.

This version of the Macbeth story is centered on the high school social strata in which Mac (Lukas Simcox) and Beth (Jacqueline Lutz) must navigate their lives. Hanging over this pathologically insidious cliquedom manifested in high school hallways and cafeterias is their parents' toxically competitive culture manifested in the institution that is high school football. "It's kind of creepy, actually," says Banquo (William Waugh): "All these, like, 40- and 50-year-olds so hyper focused on whether or not a bunch of teenagers play a game correctly."

Turning rival high schools competing for dominate bragging rights in football into a parallel for Scots and Vikings battling for dominion of a nation is a bit of stretch. Stoller pulls it off by relying on the tendency of football fans to approach the sport as an allegory for warfare. Whereas Shakespeare's Macbeth, the Thane of Glamis, wins the battle by unseeming the Norse commander "from the nave to th' chops," Stoller's Mac, a third-string receiver playing for Dunsinane High against the Norwegian Prep Vikings, leaps to snare a pass intended for Dunsinane's first-string receiver and "dancing his way towards the end zone for the winning touchdown." That first-string receiver's name is Cawdor. The Thane of Cawdor is the traitor in Macbeth, and Cawdor is here, too: he had been fumbling every pass thrown to him apparently in cahoots with the Vikings players.

This opening scene is the first of a continuing string of Macbeth references in names, geography, and lines that Stoller uses in her play. Some are intended as comedy; others she uses to flesh out characters or drive the plot and drive home her script's thematic essence.
Shakespeare presents Macbeth from the start as an exemplary warrior, and does so with Banquo, too. Stoller's Mac loves football, but he's third string, and Banquo's family has never produced a football player. "That's why I'm team manager and not on the field," he says.

Mac being relegated to the bench stings his father (Danny Gavigan) more than him. Dad was a football hero when he was attending Dunsinane High and constantly berates his "mediocre" son when he's not ignoring him. "Almost isn't good enough" Mr. M says to his son, then yells at his wife who accuses him of being too hard on Mac. "You want to waste all this time driving him to and from practice, all this money on uniforms if he's just gonna be mediocre?" concluding that "We have very different views on what it means to be a good parent."

It's notable that one of the rare times Stoller goes pure Shakespeare in her script comes after not one but two ghosts appear at Mac's celebratory party, Duncan and Banquo. He tells Beth, "It will have blood. That's what my father always says. Blood will have blood," and Mac finishes the original speech:

Stones have been known to move, and trees to speak. Augures and understood relations have by magot pies and choughs and rooks brought forth the secret'st man of blood.

Stoller gives Macbeth's allegory multi-metaphoric meanings crossing generations.

For his heroics in the game against Norwegian Prep, Mac called on his determination to get Dunsinane the win needed to play in the championship game against their chief rival, Birnum Wood. That Mac can't fathom how he pulled off that catch and touchdown run is his first encounter with what he sees as something supernatural happening to him as opposed to his skills. This is his frame of mind when, as he and Banquo are exulting over Mac's heroics, the skies turn stormy. "These clouds—they came out of nowhere, right?" Banquo says. "Yeah," Mac replies. "God, I have never experienced a day that was so bad and so good at the same time." It's the fair is foul moment of meeting the three witches (Sev Conley, Ani Veeraraghavan, and Winter Flynn). "No wonder the clouds are rolling in," Banquo says to the three goth girls. "It's not nighttime yet: shouldn't you still be in your cave? Or under your bridge? Wherever you trolls hang out."

After the witches respond with their hails to Macbeth, they acquiesce to Banquo's demand that they foretell his future: he is "lesser than Mac but also greater" and "not as happy as Mac, yet much happier" and, number three, "Your blood will be quarterbacks, even though you will not be one." What makes this prediction so outlandish is that Banquo's family has never produced football players. "That's why I'm team manager and not on the field."

Of all the plotlines in Shakespeare's Macbeth, Stoller closely hews to that of the witches, including the apparitions, and does a bit of equivocation of her own layered on that of Shakespeare's witches. After all, if you are willing to believe in Shakespeare's weird sisters, you are likely to believe in Stoller's "witchy girls."

Stoller's plotline for Mac is a harder sell, though she does manage to come up with a suitable way to off the entitled starting quarterback, Duncan (Deacon Crenshaw), via drunk driving. He then pins the blame on Duncan's two freshmen handlers, Gus Char as Boofter and Dominic Gavito as Grizzle: not Shakespearean character names but the product of Duncan feeling so entitled he can create new names of his own liking for his inferiors. Plot parallels have Mac seeing a bloody football jersey before him instead of a dagger, a jersey that reminds him of his father. "My dad wore one just like you, once," Mac says to the jersey. "There are photos of him in it all over the living room. But his wasn't…" and that's when he sees blood on the jersey. Mac ponders the fate just beyond his hand reaching for the jersey. "Maybe this once, almost is good enough," he says. "The more I think about what it would take to have you, the less I think I want it. But still"—he pauses—"Still, even covered in blood, I want it," and Mac grabs the jersey. When he meets Beth after "it's done," instead of holding bloody daggers in his hands, Mac is holding Duncan's red cup that Beth grabs to avoid Mac having any association with Duncon before his fatal drunken drive. As she does so, Beth spills red liquid from the cup onto her cheerleading uniform, a stain that doesn't come out.

The death of Duncan and apparent murder of Banquo are not intended by Mac; rather, he sees the consequences of his actions as steps toward his ordinated destiny. This drives him into a state of paranoid despotism, especially as Duff the running back (Cooper Short), turns against him and starts plotting with Duncan's protégé, Malcolm (Roberto Valentin III) to bring Birnum Wood to Dunsinane.

Where Stoller most contributes character dimensions to Shakespeare's play is in her portrayal of Beth. Shakespeare provides only an obtuse back story for Lady Macbeth. All we know about her is that she was sometime a mother, and in the present she and her husband are passionately in love with each other, though I've seen productions that emphasize instead her passive-aggressive nature. Lady Macbeth displays an extraordinary amount of ambition, but whether entirely for her husband or for herself, too, is in the actors' interpretation. And she's impatient; why wait for the witches' prediction of Macbeth becoming king hereafter when they can make that happen here and now. Or, as Beth puts it to Mac, "I'm suggesting that we just find a way to move the witches' prophecy along. If it's gonna happen anyway."

Except being a sometime mother, Lutz's Beth has these all these traits but is driven further by her fears of being socially substandard. Her family is not monied like that of her peers, so she feels she has to work harder at her schoolwork and after-school activities. "I am a straight-A student, I belong to, like, every extra-curricular activity, even the weird ones," Beth tells her sister, Sierra (Ava Spera), who got a scholarship ride to MIT. "You jumped two grades and were being labeled a genius at age 11," Beth complains when her sister tries to give her advice. "You are not the norm. Some of us are born brilliant, while others of us have to work at it."

Beth's primary social validation comes from being a cheerleader, and most odious to her is being stuck at the bottom of the pyramid. She's speaking literally of a cheerleaders mounted on each others' shoulders to form a pyramid, and colleges don't "give a ton of athletic scholarships to the girls who are at the bottom of the pyramid. But unfortunately for me, Lizzie Duff is top of the pyramid, because the Duffs are a legacy family and, like, the biggest donors of all time."

It's tantalizing to think Lady Macbeth might be driven by a similar inferiority complex. One potential clue is in King Duncan's sequence of praising Macbeth's actions in the war with promises that the king"will labor to make thee full of growing," but then almost immediately announcing his son as heir to the throne. The manner in which Duncan plays out this sequence has no stage directions to guide us; all we have to go on is how it discombobulate Macbeth to the point that he starts thinking of killing the king. Stoller's script has inspired me to wonder how might that moment and subsequent lines come off if Duncan were played with a sense of passive aggressive privilege that he uses to mess with the thanes. It's only a textual pinprick, perhaps, but such dynamics could also be at play in Lady Macbeth's murderous turn, too.

Beth's subsequent slide into depression mirrors that of Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth, but Stoller has Beth poignantly predicting her own end. "You need to take a break," his sister tells her. "No, I don't," Beth replies. "I can take a break when I'm dead." Though it's Lizzie Duff (Lily Glista) who equates being kicked off the cheerleading team as worse than death, we can stretch that allegory to Beth, especially as Lutz plays Beth with a frantic edge.

This Ends in Blood personifies the most prominent danger facing teens today: stress. The opening scene has uniformed football players and cheerleaders doing high-energy exercises as voice-over newscasts and interviews describe the academic and social stressors that have contributed to the rising rate of suicide among teens in recent years. Boys must heighten their efforts to extreme levels in order to be winners. Girls must raise their efforts to extreme heights in order to feel worthy—which is literally the case with Beth. The teen-ager's community is no longer confined to a neighborhood, school, and activities of shared interests: it's become an internet-connected world that has expanded their realm of opportunities and social options but also the competition, bullying, and poisonous influences that come with it.

In a Shakespearean way, This Ends in Blood collapses time and thus doesn't linger long on the deaths; there's hardly time for the characters to even grieve. Stoller pokes fun at Shakespearean tropes by naming one of the football players after the generic Servant in Macbeth having Mac go off on a kid named Seyton thinking he's Satan. The final fight between Duff and Mac is nothing more than a typical high school brawl, and we slide into the moral of the play—just let the players play—in a disjointed finale that even channels Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare's one true teen play. Ultimately, the gravatas of what happens to Shakespeare's Macbeth at Dunsinane—a tyrant who brought his country to ruin and ends up beheaded for his sins—is beyond the grasp of Stoller's students who attend Dunsinane High.

That is a quibble. On the whole, This Ends in Blood reflects the production values of the Tony Award-winning Signature Theatre's professional productions and, frankly, it has the acting chops, too. The high school students in this production are an accomplished ensemble, a tight company of actors who richly render their characters with studied precision. Zobell's direction keeps the action constantly moving, using the square theater's corner exit halls to extend the scene's geography, whether it's Mac's touchdown run or the teens entering and exiting the alcohol-infused party at Duncan's mcmansion home. All this and Stoller's script proves to be both a derivation of Macbeth and a contributor to the social studies Shakespeare's play has long inspired.
Eric Minton
September 24, 2026

ASIDE: Signature in the Schools

Signature in the Schools encompasses in-school workshops for local English, social studies, and theater classes, theatrical training for young artists, and the creation of an original play. The play is directed, designed, and written by professional artists and features a cast and crew of high school students from throughout Northern Virginia plus a professional actor.

Early in the school year, students audition and interview for acting and technical positions. Once selected, student actors and technicians participate in a three-week boot camp where they receive intensive acting training and innovative lessons centered on the subject matter of the production. For Macbeth, they "dove deep" into the costs of toxic competition and ambition in schools, "themes from Shakespeare's famous tragedy."

Once the script is written, the cast rehearses for five weeks, and costumes and props are built. Costumes, lights, sound, props, and actors all come together as the production moves from the rehearsal room to the theater. The full crew has only four days to combine their elements before their first audience arrives. There are five performances for public school groups and two performances for the public.

Many of the participating school groups receive in-class workshops to prepare them for their visits or a debrief after they've seen the production. This is first time many students are seeing a production at a professional theater—and on that stage and backstage are their peers. The workshop visits use theater to help the students learn about the show's academic connections and articulat their own feelings about the subject matter.

 

 

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