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\u201cWomen of Will\u201d owes its inspiration and even its title to Tina Packer, the founding artistic director of the acclaimed\u00a0Shakespeare & Company theater company<\/a>\u00a0of Lenox, Massachusetts,\u00a0\u00a0who died earlier this year at the age of 87, having spent much of her life studying Shakespeare\u2019s female characters.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n In this new play\u00a0written by Siofra Dromgoole, a bartender (Ella Loudon) is preparing for an audition to get into drama school, when one of her customers, an aging actor (Nigel Gore), offers to assist her. They meet weekly in the pub,\u00a0rehearsing\/reciting some of the Bard\u2019s most familiar lines written for women \u2013 from Juliet to Viola (disguised as Cesario) in \u201cTwelfth Night\u201d to Lady Macbeth. They also discuss and debate these characters, and Shakespeare\u2019s attitudes towards them.\u00a0\u00a0If the circumstances of their conversations\u00a0\u00a0and the setting in a working bar feel at best unnecessary, the performances and discussion are clearly meant to pay tribute to Packer.\u00a0<\/p>\n A British-born actress and then director (graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, associate artist at the Royal Shakespeare Company) Packer had been engaged professionally with virtually every one of the Bard\u2019s plays, when she authored\u201cWomen of Will\u201d \u00a0a scholarly work of analysis <\/a>\u00a0and gave the same title to a wildly ambitious work of theater.\u00a0\u00a0It was Packer\u2019s thesis that\u00a0\u00a0Shakespeare evolved in his attitude towards women over the course of his 25-year playwriting career, and her ten-hour play was divided into five separate parts, each focused on what she identified as one of the five distinct stages in his treatment of female characters. In his first stage, for example, Packer argued, the women were either warriors or virgins; the very first female character that Shakespeare wrote for the stage was Joan of Arc, in Henry VI, Part 1.\u00a0\u00a0In the last stage, Packer maintained, the characters were female phoenixes or healing daughters, like Miranda in \u201cThe Tempest.\u201d<\/p>\n Some of this is touched on in\u00a0Dromgoole\u2019s play. But the change swe tracked the most were in the improvement in the bartender\u2019s performances (The actress portraying her, Loudon, was clearly in control..) And the insights about the Bard had to share the spotlight with attention to the lives and dramas of the two modern-day characters. I would have preferred exposition in-between the lines from Shakespeare. This is the approach that Patrick Page took in his one-man show\u00a0\u00a0All The Devils Are Here:\u00a0How Shakespeare Invented the Villain<\/a><\/p>\n This was also more or less the approach that Tina Packer herself took in the two-and-a-half hour \u201coverview\u201d of her \u201cWomen of Will\u201d that I saw at The Gym at Judson in New York in 2013, which marked Packer\u2019s New York stage acting debut. Like Page in his play, Packer stuck to insights and observations when she wasn\u2019t performing the Bard\u2019s lines, although she did engage (as herself) in some banter with her acting partner, who was the very same Nigel Gore who now is portraying somebody other than himself, in-between some of the very same Shakespearean scenes.<\/p>\n
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Tina Packer in Women of Will, 2013 <\/p>\n