Will Re-Done

Certainly it is difficult to completely re-make the Bard anew, yet Shakespeare in New York in this post — Sleep No More world seems to be challenging previous standards with an intriguing blend of performance art, acting prowess, and a re-visioning of classical text. Alan Cumming played all the significant roles in Macbeth on Broadway, and downtown at the Gym at Judson Church, Tina Packer played a sizeable number of the 150-plus female roles (and some of the male ones) in Women of Will. Packer — founder and former Artistic Director of Shakespeare and Company, based in Lenox, Massachusetts — is one of the world’s foremost experts on Shakespeare. In Tina Packer’s Women of Will, an epic engagement of twenty-five plays, fifty-five scenes, and plenty of side commentary, Packer creates a theatrical master class. The title, as Packer explains, connotes a three-fold meaning: first she explores Shakespeare’s women to investigate not only the development of these characters, but of Shakespeare’s relationship to women. Second, she traces the “will to power” both physically, and through other, more feminine means, such as the power of language itself. Third, we learn that “will” during Elizabethan England also referred to sexual desire or sexuality. “It also means the sexual parts themselves,” she quips, “but we won’t be looking at those unless we get desperate.”

Her feminist reading of the development of Shakespeare’s characters makes even an educated audience rethink the development of this most canonical playwright. Indeed, the content and integration of commentary and asides turns what could be merely a brilliantly acted revue of Shakespearean highlights into an original performance piece with pedagogical merit and genuinely surprising contrasts and connections. Staged with Nigel Gore as Packer’s acting counterpart, directed by Eric Tucker, and with simple but effective scenic and costume design by Valerie Bart, Women of Will is an epic and somewhat overwhelming cycle that includes an overview, five independently staged parts, and a full five-part marathon weekend. And while Packer has been developing this work since the 1990s, the Judson production is her New York debut.

Part I: Warrior Women — From Violence to Negotiation begins with a round of canned applause and a theme tune ripped from a sitcom or game show. Packer and Gore enter and begin selections from The Comedy of Errors, with Packer as Luciana and Gore as Adriana, both wearing wigs and dresses. Luciana’s expansive monologue informs the audience that men are endowed with “intellectual sense and souls,” with the implication that women possess neither. The theme music and canned laughs return, at which point Packer and Gore break out of character to introduce the show. The audience will soon become used to such asides, which become as much a part of the show as the Shakespearean dialogue. Packer explains that this scene is exemplary of Shakespeare’s early plays: here, women can be easily divided into shrewish women like Adriana and innocent virgins like Luciana. These early women are written as mere caricatures, rather than fully developed people — and that, Packer says, is where the problem begins.

Because of the simplicity of the women in these early comedies, Packer instead focuses on the history plays. Joan of Arc provides Packer with her first character study, one that, she explains, is written to be both virgin and virago. In her initial scene as Joan, Packer plays her as youthful, feisty and quite likeable. Then both Shakespeare’s writing and Packer’s performance transform, and in the next scene she snarls like a wild beast. This total reversal is difficult for an actor to play, but Packer does this and all of her hairpin turns with British verbal precision. Indeed, these turns enable Packer to comment upon and manifest Shakespeare’s own shifts in attitude towards his female characters.

Joan’s final curse on the English before her execution, the case...