MacBird! originated in August, 1965, as a slip of the tongue when Barbara Garson, speaking at an anti-war rally in Berkeley, California, quite accidentally referred to the First Lady of the United States as Lady MacBird Johnson. Since it was just a few weeks after the Watts insurrection and the Berkeley troop-train demonstrations, the opening lines of a play suggested themselves immediately: "When shall we three meet again/in riot, strike, or stopping train?"
She decided to write a fifteen-minute skit or playlet based on Macbeth to be performed at the October 15-16 International Days of Protest. By October 15 there was no skit, however, for she was embarked upon a full-length play.
In December she took a completed first-draft manuscript with her on a trip to New York and showed it to Roy Levine, an old friend with experience in the theater as a stage designer. He and Julia Curtis, then working as a secretary at Random House, decided on the spot that the play could and should be performed professionally in New York. Barbara was skeptical, but told them they were free to try. Within a year, by Christmas of 1966, a professional production had been fully capitalized and cast and was in rehearsal, with Julia Curtis and David Productions producing and Roy Levine directing.
During the Spring of 1966 the entire first draft was printed by the Independent Socialist Club of Berkeley, in an edition of 2,000 copies which sold out in six weeks; extensive excerpts appeared in the Berkeley magazine Despite Everything; but otherwise MacBird! was known only by the New York literati among whom Julia Curtis had been circulating manuscripts.
By August, 1966, the play had been read and warmly praised by such important literary figures as Robert Lowell, Eric Bentley, and Robert Brustein, but still no major magazine or publisher was willing to touch it. The author's husband, Marvin Garson, decided to publish the play himself, establishing for that purpose the "Grassy Knoll Press." Five thousand copies of MacBird! were printed at the Berkeley Free Press, an all-night leaflet factory which the Garsons had helped establish during the Free Speech Movement in 1964.
The first printing disappeared in a few weeks. By January the Grassy Knoll had turned green, having gone through five printings totaling 105,000 copies.
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