Tina Packer’s wonderful production “Women of Will”
Director, Actor and Scholar Tina Packer, former Artistic Director of “Shakespeare and Company” in Lenox, MA has written and is performing a new production entitled “Women of Will”. Fabulous!
Tina Packer and Nigel Gore
The work looks at the way Shakespeare wrote his women characters, and how that writing evolved over his 20-year career as a writer.
It is all done with two actors only – Tina and a terrific scene partner named Nigel Gore. They perform scenes, then talk about them, and then move on to the next.
Her piece is fascinating and beautifully organized. Her main premise is that Shakespeare’s view of women evolved over the course of career, starting out writing ‘about’ women, and then, starting with Juliet, writing from ‘inside’ women’s point of view – with deeper understanding of that point of view and creating much deeper, 3 dimensional characters.
Many people have written about Shakespeare’s evolution – making his stories more complex and deeper as he went along – but it is great to see this applied to his views and understanding of women. Packer breaks down the analysis into five parts — each one is chronologic – in the evolution of Shakespeare’s writing.
One of the really important points she makes is that Shakespeare keeps women confined while they are playing themselves, but allows them much more independence and power to affect things when disguised as men – which makes sense, given the time and obstacles women faced.
She illustrates this by comparing scenes from Othello with scenes from As You Like It. Desdemona in Othello is bound by conventions and has little power to change her fate — she can present herself only as true and honest and hope for the best, and loses her life. Rosalind on the other hand, disguises herself as a man, and enjoys great freedom to affect things and to create her own destiny.
She also points out that in his late works Shakespeare often has daughters become the saviors of their lost fathers — Lear, Pericles, The Tempest, Winter’s Tale and she presents the very moving scene from Pericles when Pericles discovers his long lost daughter Marina.
The production is wonderful. And it is an important addition to our understanding of Shakespeare’s work and his vision of humanity.
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