Drive past the I-285 loop and the last subdivision billboard, and the glow of Atlanta’s soundstages thins into dark trees and gravel roads. Then, at Art Farm at Serenbe in Chattahoochee Hills, you step into a room you’ve seen a thousand times but never actually entered: overstuffed sofa, boxy TV, soft haze of studio lighting. It looks exactly like ’90s Thursday-night comfort — until Shakespeare’s blood-soaked ambition starts to seep into the laugh track.
The Know
- What: M.A.C.B.E.T.H. at Art Farm, a sitcom-inspired retelling of Shakespeare’s Macbeth on a 1990s-style TV set
- Where: Art Farm at Serenbe in Chattahoochee Hills, southwest of Atlanta
- When: Opening May 8, 2026 (mature audiences only)
- Who: Written and directed by Erin Stegeman, whose adaptation grew out of a personal collision of grief and ’90s TV comfort
- Why it matters: It folds Atlanta’s TV legacy and rerun culture into a live psychological drama, pushing local theater into the language of streaming and syndication
- Good to know: Expect an intimate space, stylized TV aesthetics, and a production that treats nostalgia as something to question, not just bask in
How to go
- Start with the source: Check ArtsATL’s listing and feature and the Art Farm site for performance dates, ticketing, and age guidance.
- Plan the drive: Art Farm is in Chattahoochee Hills, outside the Perimeter; build in extra time from Atlanta to navigate two-lane roads and arrive before curtain.
- Go in with context: This is a mature, psychologically dark comedy that riffs on Friends and other ’90s sitcoms as much as it does on Shakespeare. If you know Macbeth or grew up on network TV, you’ll catch extra layers.
Atlanta’s TV comfort, rewired
For Atlanta audiences, the premise of M.A.C.B.E.T.H. lands close to home. This is a city where the TV industry isn’t abstract — it’s traffic jams near soundstages, relatives picking up background gigs, favorite diners popping up in streaming thrillers. Turner-era reruns, basic-cable marathons and prestige shoots have all run through the metro, so staging Shakespeare’s most paranoid tragedy inside a sitcom living room doesn’t just reference pop culture; it speaks in Atlanta’s own media cadence.
Writer-director Erin Stegeman found the form in a moment of loss. As she told ArtsATL, news that her uncle and godfather had died from ALS landed the same day as the push alert that Friends star Matthew Perry had also passed. The double shock sent her back to her comfort show and to the Macbeth text she was already adapting — and to the ways both hide grief in plain sight.
Rewatching, she began tracing parallels between sitcom archetypes and Shakespearean counterparts, especially around Lady Macbeth’s debated “given suck” line — a hint of child loss and postpartum grief beneath the character’s steel. That friction between canned laughter and unspeakable sorrow became the engine for a new structure.
The 1990s sitcom set is instantly legible: one room, bright colors, clear sight lines. The couch is for confessions, the kitchen entrance for punchlines, the staircase for exits. M.A.C.B.E.T.H. repurposes that language the way Atlanta chefs flip Southern staples, tweaking the familiar until it lands as something sharper and stranger.
Under soft studio lights, Shakespeare’s beats start to echo a multi-cam comedy: recurring gags become recurring visions; entrances and exits hit with writers’-room precision; moments of horror land where you half-expect a studio audience to laugh. The result is a persistent unease between what your body expects (comfort) and what’s actually happening (downward spiral) — a live-theater riff on how TV has trained us to metabolize violence and breakdowns as “content,” neatly packaged between commercial breaks.
An ambitious experiment just past the Perimeter
What roots this production here isn’t a skyline reference but sensibility. Art Farm sits in an arts ecosystem that runs from Midtown stages to BeltLine pop-ups. It has room to think oddly about form: What happens when you filter Shakespeare through the network-TV aesthetics that once defined Atlanta’s national image?
The city has long sold itself through screens — news networks, sports broadcasts, sitcoms, now streaming juggernauts — while institutions like the High Museum of Art and the Center for Puppetry Arts keep pushing tactile, in-the-room storytelling. M.A.C.B.E.T.H. taps both: it looks like it belongs on a nearby soundstage, but plays out with the risk of live theater.
There’s a charge in how the show frames ambition. Atlanta lives on big swings — airport expansions, stadiums, the booming film sector. Dropping Macbeth, the clearest story about ambition gone toxic, into a genre built to keep consequences light becomes its own commentary on how success gets packaged here and everywhere. The production doesn’t sermonize; it lets the dissonance between sitcom gloss and tragic fallout vibrate in the room.
The drive to Art Farm becomes part of the argument. You pass warehouses stamped with studio logos and fresh subdivisions, then step into a TV set that feels teleported out of your childhood. For Atlanta readers, the payoff is specific: a taut piece of theater wrestling with grief, ambition and nostalgia — and a reminder that some of the sharpest thinking about screen culture isn’t happening in corporate boardrooms, but in a small room just outside town, where a live audience and a few pieces of familiar furniture are enough to warp an entire genre in real time.
