Shakespeare in New England, 2007

Continuing a growing summer tradition in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, actors from Shakespeare & Company collaborated again this summer (2007) with musicians and composers from Tanglewood Music Center on a staged reading of a Shakespeare play with full musical accompaniment. Two things in particular struck me in the course of listening to this year's performance, Macbeth. First, how fitting it felt to listen to the play's magnificent language in a concert space (Ozawa Hall) with impeccable acoustics and a physical orientation toward sound; second, how often I experienced the distressing impulse to shush the musicians. The music, as music, was in fact an engaging mix of classical and contemporary styles that reflected the collaborative effort of six Composition Fellows at Tanglewood. Ranging in mood from the eerie to the martial, it was especially effective between scenes in providing transitional soundscapes that prepared the audience for new emotional registers. However, when the music was played to underscore the words within scenes, it frequently—particularly at the most charged moments ("unsex me here," "Tomorrow and tomorrow," etc.)—became a competing, and sometimes irritating, distraction. Indeed, it was when the actors' voices alone reverberated through the hall with the music of the language that the quality of the sound was, for me, the most resonant.

I tell this story not to suggest that music and Shakespearean text are incompatible, but to illustrate a virtue of the acting practices associated with Shakespeare & Company and especially with its founder and artistic director, Tina Packer, who was not coincidentally Lady Macbeth in the above collaboration. The story of Tina Packer and her company has been well documented, but it is worth repeating some highlights. Packer came to America from England and, after some initial forays, founded the company in 1978 with the explicit goal of creating a classical repertory company that brought together the English training model she was exposed to (at BADA, LAMDA, and the RSC) with the emotional vigor and openness to risk-taking and self-searching that she felt to be uniquely American. As she wrote in a grant application for a project that became a precursor to Shakespeare & Company, she detected two distinct qualities in many American actors: "a vigor and directness" that made them "better able to express the depth and breadth of Shakespeare's characters," but also a certain technical neglect born of the "fear" of the "words" and the "verse" that led to their missing the rhythm of the language and thus also its "soul." Little has changed in thirty years in the philosophy, or near-evangelical fervor, behind these words, as indicated in a recent essay Packer wrote in which she emphasizes equally "the structure of the verse" and the need for actors "to consciously tap into [them]selves" to discover the character. Indeed, before doing scene work in rehearsals, Shakespeare & Company still practices the technique of "dropping in" that Packer developed with Kristin Linklater (author of Freeing the Natural Voice) in the early 1970s. In this exercise, actors are "fed" individual words and asked to repeat them as they conjure personal emotional associations with the words; the goal is to release, or free, the emotional potential buried in words—as a way of working "from the inside out" and getting beyond the artificiality of "speaking beautifully" with "pear-shaped" vowels. This kind of freely associative release is, however, coupled with rigorous text work and painstaking attention to prosody—to avoid the continuing American proclivity for shapeless brooding and outburst. After all these years, Packer is still at it and, as I certainly felt when I interviewed her, still as passionate about it as she ever has been.

And that passion has paid off in many ways, especially in the influence she has exerted on Shakespeare in New England. Most visibly, actors who have trained with her can be found spreading her gospel in an eclectic range of companies and venues in productions that are equally diverse. Of course a host of other, and independent, developments and changes in everything from drama school training to audience tastes has to be taken into...