With Shakespeare’s women, seeing is believing

June 03, 2010|Louise Kennedy, Globe Staff

LENOX — Tina Packer’s “Women of Will’’ is not exactly a play, but it is an intensely theatrical experience. Drawing on her lifetime of acting in and directing Shakespeare’s plays, Packer combines the performance of scenes with the discussion of themes to create a dazzling and illuminating piece of work. For anyone who cares about women, Shakespeare, or especially women in Shakespeare, it’s not to be missed.

Packer first delved into this project in the early 1990s, then put it aside for her work as artistic director of Shakespeare & Company. Now that she’s handed those reins to Tony Simotes, she has returned to this more personal work with a vengeance. For nearly three hours, she and her performing partner, Nigel Gore, hold the stage of the company’s Founders’ Theatre with no set, the merest suggestion of costumes, and a few props. At summer’s end, Packer will expand each of the five sections of this work into a separate full performance, for a marathon five-show event spread over three days.

That, like the book she hopes to write about Shakespeare’s women, promises to be a thoroughly revelatory examination of the ideas that engage her here. Already, though, “Women of Will’’ offers more food for thought, and more insightful moments of fine acting, than many a full-fledged Shakespeare production. Partly because Packer and Gore are so clearly at ease onstage together, and partly because the scenes they enact flow so seamlessly out of and into the remarks by Packer (and occasionally, often with a wicked gleam, the engaging Gore), “Women of Will’’ combines the visceral pleasure of great performances with the heady joys of great conversation.

That combination makes sense, for one of Packer’s central themes is the development, over the course of Shakespeare’s career, of his interest in merging the spiritual with the sexual — an interest that, Packer says, first emerged strongly in “Romeo and Juliet.’’ (Not coincidentally, she also calls Juliet his “great leap’’ from describing female characters to writing from within their psyches.) For Packer, Shakespeare’s women, particularly from Juliet on, constitute the literal embodiment of his ideas about society, humanity, and the role of the artist. In his women’s bodies, she argues persuasively, we can see Shakespeare’s mind.

What’s remarkable about the performances in “Women of Will’’ is how clearly they demonstrate this merging of body and spirit. As Packer freely admits, she’s too old to play many of Shakespeare’s women — and yet play them she does for this event, and with a complexity and depth of understanding that make each one of them come alive in fresh new ways.