When Chris Rock said The Tragedy of Macbeth aloud on stage at the 2022 Academy Awards moments before Will Smith slapped him, the theater community had its own explanation: he said the name. This episode pulls back the curtain on the most feared superstition in the performing arts, from the strict rules banning the title anywhere in a theater outside of rehearsal and performance, to the euphemisms of the Scottish play, the Bard’s play, Mackers, the Scottish King and Lady M, and Patrick Stewart’s claim that playing the role earns lifetime immunity.

We weigh the two origin stories, an offended coven of real witches whose spells Shakespeare borrowed for the double-double toil and trouble scene, versus the economics of Elizabethan theater where a guaranteed blockbuster with expensive effects was staged by companies on the brink of bankruptcy. The episode walks through the cleansing ritual of spinning three times, spitting, swearing, quoting Hamlet and knocking to be let back in, its parodies in The Dresser, Blackadder, Slings and Arrows and The Simpsons, and a historical body count that includes Laurence Olivier’s 1937 Old Vic run, Diana Wynyard’s fall, Charlton Heston’s kerosene-soaked tights, the 1849 Astor Place riot, Harold Norman’s fatal on-stage stabbing in 1947, a Lisbon theater fire in 1964 and a 1988 tragedy at the Metropolitan Opera.

• How correlation became causation: failing theaters staged the play, then blamed the play for failing
• Dim lighting, heavy broadswords, fog and slick floors as a practical recipe for disaster
• Peter O’Toole’s 1980 production dubbed MacDeath and the company that disbanded after it
• The curse on film sets: Dario Argento’s Opera and Ari Aster’s exploding light on Hereditary
• Confirmation bias, the human need for control, and why a shared myth binds a vulnerable profession