The extraordinary depth and breadth of Tina Packer’s Women of Will is not only revealing, it is like reincarnating the Bard himself for a serious talk. And talking to. With ridiculous movies trying to foist the notion that Shakespeare wasn’t the author of his plays, it is both a joy and a revelation to hear and watch an actor like Packer give herself so completely to the search for fact, detail and anecdote. It takes five successive evenings of exploration with the Founding Artistic Director of Shakespeare & Company to completely tell the story.
So after a successful run this summer in Lenox, Tina Packer takes her masterpiece Women of Will for a spin around the state and across the country. There are two versions, the 5-part Women of Will, The Complete Journey and the Reader’s Digest version: Women of Will, The Overview. Both grew out of Packer’s four decades long investigation of all things Shakespeare.
Packer has left Lenox behind, for now, and is currently performing through November 6, at the Nora Theatre Company at Central Square Theater in Cambridge, MA before traveling to the Dusty Loo Bon Vivant Theater in Colorado Springs for a limited run November 9-13. Other dates and locations for the coming year include North Hampton, New Jersey and Prague. Visit: www.women-of-will.com for more information.
Director Eric Tucker, who helmed S&Co.s’ Women of Will production for the past two seasons, tours with Packer along with her talented acting mate and cohort Nigel Gore, which gives the trio additional opportunities to continue to explore Shakespeare’s canon. Packer and Gore have starred opposite each other in several productions, including Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (which netted Gore an Elliot Norton Award for Best Actor in 2010), Antony & Cleopatra, Hamlet, and Coriolanus (Packer’s all-male version in England last year which she directed) to name a few. Packer will also be directing King Richard III this summer at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival with Gore in the title role, which will run concurrently with all five parts of Women of Will.
For more information on performances of Women of Will at the Nora Theater through November 6, visit: www.centralsquaretheater.org or call 617.576.9278 x210.
For more information on performances of Women of Will at Colorado’s Dusty Loo Theatre visit: www.theatreworkscs.org or call (719) 255-3232.
For more information on performances of Women of Will at The Colorado Shakespeare Festival visit: www.coloradoshakes.org/box-office or call (303) 492-0554.
All three artists have been working together for the past three years fine-tuning Women of Will, The Complete Journey, and The Overview guiding it from a workshop piece to a fully-realized, five-part series. This past spring, they tried it out on audiences not only at Shakespeare & Company but in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Charlotte, North Carolina, and Boston.
Tina Packer. Kevin Sprague photos.
“We’ve had the great pleasure to present this work to audiences in England and all over the U.S. Next summer we’ll take all five parts to Colorado, New Jersey, Prague and New York City. Working on Women of Will, not unlike working on Shakespeare’s plays themselves, is a never ending process of deepening the arguments, finding parallels to our daily lives, sharpening the scenes and finding new ways to break down the barriers between performer and audience.”
A true theatrical breakthrough, Women of Will, The Complete Journey is both comprehensive and entertaining. Each of the five parts stands on their own – they can be seen separately or in succession. The press release suggests that “if you’re in the mood for love and romance, well that would be Part II…dark and tragic anyone? Part IV. Each part is a wholly independent play so there’s a flavor of Shakespeare to fit everyone’s taste.”
“In studying the female characters in Shakespeare’s plays in the order in which the playwright wrote them, I have been tracing their development and maturation over the span of the Canon,” says Packer. “Through his relationship with the women he creates, Shakespeare reveals much about his own character and spirit as an artist. Because the women generally survive outside the power structure of society, they look at, maneuver and reflect upon the workings of that society, not unlike an artist.
“The feminine sensibilities of intuition, feeling and relationship parallel those of the artist. So, if you want to know what Shakespeare thinks, listen to the women. Because there are fewer women than men in the plays, the women often have a clear definition of being the “other.” And often they manifest the very souls or spirit of the stories. The women have a specific progression from the fighting warrior women and virgins-on-the-pedestal of the early plays; to the heroines who struggle to find themselves in the middle plays; to the daughters who, through their own wholeness, are able to guide their fathers back to life in the late plays.
“I believe the women reflect the development of Shakespeare’s own psyche. Shakespeare, being one of the greatest artists who ever lived, is able to reveal over a 25-year span his mind to us, and this in turn actually exposes on an archetypal level the development of a universal human psyche. I have come to understand myself through this study. I too have been immersed in the plays for 35 years, both as a director and as an actor and have an intimate relationship with most of Shakespeare’s writing. In many ways, my own development as an artist is reflected in the development of his women. First there is the battle, then the negotiation. In order to survive, I personally went underground and now I am coming back from the underground to a new birth—the maiden phoenix if you will. And whole, in a way I never was before,” continues Packer.
“Women of Will, in its many incantations has undoubtedly been the toughest project for all of us,” adds Tucker. “And nothing short of inspirational, insightful, daunting, exciting, exhausting and energizing – yes, all at the same time! It has been our task and great joy to smooth out the edges, remove the seams and transform the piece into five extraordinary evenings of theatre. Tina is arguably the only female director and actor in the world to have taken on this staggering journey – examining some 170 female characters from Shakespeare’s cannon (he penned over 700 male characters) from a female perspective and in chronological order. I take pride in knowing we’re doing something that hasn’t been done before. Tina equally matches her strength as an actor with her wealth of knowledge as a scholar and her exploration of the feminine in Shakespeare’s plays is truly innovative and life changing.”
Women of Will, The Complete Journey – Synopsis
PART I: The Warrior Women, from Violence to Negotiation
Part One examines the early writings of William Shakespeare, his journey to becoming a playwright and actor, and the role of theatre in Elizabethan England. We also examine the first plays Shakespeare wrote, such as his early comedies (Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, Two Gentlemen of Verona and Love’s Labor’s Lost) and early histories (Henry VI: Parts 1, 2, 3, and Richard III). The performance ends with the first big change in Shakespeare’s attitude and portrayal of women: Juliet. How, Packer asks, is Shakespeare’s writing impacted when he portrays a young girl as intelligent, poetic and courageous as her Romeo?
Part One asks fundamental questions about the politics, sexuality, and actions of the women in these plays, especially in regards to the expectations put upon them. Although it is the foundation of all the subsequent parts, Part One also stands by itself as a performance, and is a terrific place to start if you’re new to Shakespeare.
PART II: The Sexual Merges with the Spiritual: New Knowledge
By writing about Juliet, Shakespeare gains a deeper understanding of the relationship between men and women. He perceives that sexuality can be an intensely spiritual journey, just as spirituality can be expressed in sensual terms. Using Romeo and Juliet as a foundation, Part Two looks at the continuation of this sexual/spiritual story, first with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, then The Merchant of Venice, followed by Much Ado About Nothing and Troilus and Cressida. Finally, the journey takes a different turn in Measure for Measure, and finds its supreme illumination in Antony and Cleopatra.
Much of Shakespeare’s creative life was consumed with the relationship between men and women, and we examine whether it was his worldly actions or his imagination that served as his chief artistic inspiration. Part II asks whether this relationship between the sexes can lead to a more fair, just, and impassioned way of living.
PART III: Living Underground or Dying to Tell the Truth
Part III wrestles with the middle period of Shakespeare’s writing life. Through the women in these plays, Shakespeare gives us a clearer picture of the constraints put upon them, where the power lies, and whether we are living in a monarchy, a republic, or in nature. Increasingly, Shakespeare’s female characters articulate the truth about what they are seeing and feeling. If these women stay dressed as women, they run mad or die (either by murder or suicide). If, however, they disguise themselves as men, they’re able to find their voices, organize those around them, and enact a play that ends happily.
We begin with Constance in King John, and then jump between As You Like It and Othello. By switching between these two plays, the audience can see the different outcomes that befall a woman who remains a woman, and a woman who disguises herself as a man. We then touch on Twelfth Night, refer back to The Merchant of Venice, and end with Hamlet.
PART IV: Chaos is Come Again, the Lion eats the Wolf
As Shakespeare enters a period of despair, he asks: what happens when women do not desire a different voice in society? What happens when they want the same power and goals as men? The answer is clearly illuminated in Macbeth, Coriolanus and King Lear, which Gore and Packer examine in Part Four.
Part IV then moves on to Timon of Athens, in which women are represented as whores who bring disease to mankind. Yet, in this dark picture, where the world is dominated by fascism, Shakespeare writes his most sublime verse. While the art form is at its height, the subject matter at its most dense and unforgiving. At the end, Shakespeare asks: is there no way out of this killing picture?
PART V: The Maiden Phoenix: the Daughter Redeems the Father
In Part V, Shakespeare changes the story. His plays stop following the exact psychological development of the protagonists, turning instead to myths and fairy tales. In these late plays ─ Pericles, Cymbeline, A Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and finally, Henry VIII ─ Shakespeare finds a way to make tragic events right again. And it’s the daughters who discover the way.
Taking the tale of the bird that immolates itself and is then born anew from its own ashes, Shakespeare names this progression the “maiden phoenix.” Led by Cordelia in King Lear, these young women find ways to redeem the past and allow the future to unfold without a story of revenge dominating the stage. Shakespeare had returned to Stratford by this time and was living amongst his own daughters, who he had left behind 20 years earlier when he went to London to seek his fortune.
The last lines written by Shakespeare about a woman is Cranmer’s blessing over the baby Elizabeth at the end of Henry VIII, and his evocation of what the feminine spirit can do for a society was born out by her reign. Within this period of learning, music, poetry, and education, Shakespeare asks: what is the role of the artist in society, and what must artists do to make our collective lives more consciously lived? Gore and Packer investigate this question in Part Five, finishing the series in the same inquisitive spirit in which they began.
Women of Will Overview: Following the Feminine in Shakespeare’s Plays
The Overview is a comprehensive 2 hour production that includes themes from the full, five-part opus, and covers the full breadth of Shakespeare’s works providing insight into the chronological growth of Shakespeare’s portrayal not only of female characters but of the qualities traditionally considered feminine. The Overview gives audiences a sumptuous snippet from each part of the Complete Journey, to whet the appetite.
