Tina Packer's Women of Will Erupts in New York
Lust Braided with Erudition
By: Susan Hall - Feb 03, 2013
Tina Packer’s Women of Will
Directed by Eric Tucker
Tina Packer and Nigel Gore
The Gym at Judson
New York, New York
February 2 – June 2013
Women-of-will.com
Photo credits Matthew Murphy courtesy Women of Will
What a piece of work these Women of Will in the hands of self-proclaimed 21st century feminist Tina Packer. The wicked Kate, martial Joan and Margaret, Juliet full of sensuous desire, Desdemona, no ninny, but a defiant daughter brimming over with lust who tells Daddy she is leaving him for his best friend, a Moor no less.
Shakespeare was of course pleasing his prime sponsor, Queen Elizabeth of England. We are not allowed to forget that her sister was called Bloody Mary for a reason, and the Elizabeth ordered her cousin Mary Stuart’s head chopped off.
The Duke of York, not in Elizabeth’s line, has to be bad; her progenitors, stars. We are introduced to women like Elizabeth, forged in tough times, where the ground rules don’t allow much room for moral subtly and namby pamby husbands like Henry VI and Macbeth get whipped into shape by their wives filled with bloody ambition.
Packer divides her evening into five parts: Martial women driven by revenge, women in whom the sexual and spiritual meld, women who move into a Living Underground, dying to tell the truth. Chaos again, as women align themselves with the masculine, and at last, the artist’s impact on the world and the power of story to elevate insight to the level of universal myth.
How the progress of these plays fit into Shakespeare’s own life is particularly fascinating. When The Bard finally returned home to Avon and his wife and daughters, we get Desdemona, the sisters in Lear, and Marina in Pericles, the lost and then found daughter.
Performance guidelines ranged over the centuries from banishment by the Puritans, to unfortunate Restoration adaptations which downplayed lust. The Shrew was not the only tamed character in Victorian times. Much of 20th century performance canon focused on mellifluous language at the expense of dramas which are most often about nothing beautiful at all -- sex and murder.
The first audiences loved the gritty gore and for all her erudition, Packer brings it back both to the language and the performance. Shakespeare’s contemporary audiences cried out as Rosalind, disguised as a boy, becomes herself and teaches Orlando about love, “She’s really a girl. Get her,” we wanted to say, as Packer takes us back to the spirit of the Bard. Packer and her partner Nigel Gore give emotionally wrenching, exuberant, and true performances in a cornucopia of roles that fascinate.
Shakespeare is no sissy wrapped into beautiful language which has to be intoned, held at an emotional distance. He is right there in the nitty gritty of our most noble and most base emotions. Packer takes us to him on her journey. Language is not sacrificed as it is embedded in emotion. Instead its primacy is underlined.
Packer and Gore end the evening with the last words Shakespeare wrote in Henry VIII. "Who from the sacred ashes of her honor Shall starlike rise as great in fame as she was, And so stand fix’d.” In its future orientation The Bard sounds not so much Tudor as Stuart. As he continues to surprise, so does Tina Packer. Fabulous theater.