Mackers!; or How I Danced with Fear

It's funny how things work out. A lot of things have happened to me since I started this blog, especially in the break between the initial postings and now. I'm sure stories of the past few years will come up, but the one I want to tell you is fairly fresh. This semester, I was involved in a production of Macbeth at my school, where we set the show in the Middle East during Arab Spring. We changed some things around, dedistributed lines to combine roles, and cut some scenes that didn't make sense in our context, but these pale in comparison to the change I love the most...
We cut the roles of the witches.
The witches were still there, mind you. We would never dream of cutting them from existence, we have no show without them. But we didn't cast witches, and the witches weren't ever consistent, nor were they people. Our witches were ideas that possessed people when they felt the burning need to speak, using humans as mouthpieces. They were corruption, power-hunger, pride and evil, but most importanly they were fear.
Now, in order to find our inner witches, we had to do a great deal of exploration, by ourselves and in groupwork. It was a strange experience, to let yourself be vulnerable to that and to expose others to what has inhabited you. I can't say it was entirely unpleasant either for many of us, at least not all of the time, which speaks to a strange quality of the human condition, and leads me to what I want to talk about today.
When we were doign workshopping, 17 of the 18 people in the cast voluntarily became witches. They felt an impulse to be taken over by evil, and they allowed it. None of us are inherently evil, but we all were susceptible to it. Needless to say, Rebecca, the ghost who chills out in our theatre, wasn't entirely pleased with us. So what does that say about life? Are we constantly at odds with ourselves, our primal vulnerability pitted against our Judeo-Christian guilt? And after this life, could we be free of that, or are we just more aware of the crisis facing humanity from the inside? I have no doubts that the afterlife is real in some form, but hwo far "after" does it stretch? I know that's a lot of questions compared to not much content, but I'm at a point where I don't know how much I can really say to this end, besides vocalizing a need for conversation. So tell me in the comments section what you think! Talk to me! Just because this production is over doesn't mean the ideas are gone, and I feel like I need to explore them still with the world.