Elm Shakespeare Opens ​“Brave New Theater”

Theater artist Terri Power discovered Shakespeare in high school, finding Lady Macbeth ​“extraordinarily powerful and sexual,” she said. Their teacher asked the class to memorize passages to perform in class. Power dressed in a long black turtleneck and sweater and skirt and delivered a monologue in which Lady Macbeth taunts her spouse: ​“I have given suck, and know / How tender ​’tis to love the babe that milks me. / I would, while it was smiling in my face, / Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums / And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn / As you have done to this.”

Her teacher sent Power to the principal’s office, where he then argued to the principal that she should be suspended for ​“revealing her breast.” The principal, looking at Power’s wardrobe, wondered exactly how Power would have done this. The teacher dialed it back: ​“She said things,” he said. 

Power said she learned two things from that encounter. First, ​“Shakespeare is staged with the imaginary forces of the audience,” she said. Second, ​“Shakespeare is so powerful as to move a room of people.… For a young teenager, to step into that power was groundbreaking for me, and it was something I never let go of. I wanted more of that experience. No one ever had the words and the power that Shakespeare does.”

The anecdote was part of ​“By the Book: Gender in Shakespeare’s Plays,” a conversation held on Zoom among three theater experts ready to dig into the tangled world of gender and the Bard: Vanessa Morosco, theater practitioner and founder of Shakespeare 50/50, dedicated to creating gender equity in the workplace of Shakespeare’s plays; Dr. Terri Power, scholar, theater artist, and author of Shakespeare and Gender in Practice; and Dr. Marguerite Tassi, professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Kearney and author of the book Women and Revenge in Shakespeare: Gender, Genre, and Ethics. 

Moderated by Rebecca Goodheart, Elm Shakespeare’s producing artistic director, the conversation was the first installment of Building a Brave New Theatre, a series of events running through the spring. Next, Tina Packer’s Women of Will runs at Southern Connecticut State University from May 16 to May 19. Lisa Wolpe’s Shakespeare & the Alchemy of Gender appears at Yale’s Schwarzman Center on June 6. On June 13, Yale’s Sterling Library hosts a panel discussion entitled ​“Blk Grrrls and the Bard: How Brilliant BIPOC Artists are Changing the Conversation.” Finally, on June 29, ​“TRANSforming Shakespeare: How Creative Casting Makes Better Plays” will be part of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas’ Summit Day.

The idea behind the series, Goodheart said, is to ​“celebrate and amplify the voices of artists and scholars from marginalized communities,” and engage in conversation about how to work with some of the issues of violence, oppression, and silencing that happen in Shakespeare’s now 400-year-old plays. 

“We bring people together through Shakespeare,” Goodheart said. ​“What is the intentionality of our work?”

Plotting Revenge

Tassi’s opening salvo was that Shakespeare’s plays have an ​“extraordinary capacity” to shed light on humanity, and given the plays’ history, there was no particular reason why women shouldn’t play all the roles in his plays. This was perhaps most true in roles centered around revenge, a central theme in Shakespeare’s work.

“No one is indifferent and no one hasn’t had the desire” for revenge, Tassi said. ​“My passion has been to investigate revenge in an empathetic and nuanced way.”

Revenge has commonly been thought of as a degradation of justice, since well before Shakespeare’s time. ​“Men routinely engage in war” and ​“vendettas” over honor, Tassi said. ​“Yet female characters incite men to revenge, and sometimes are revengers themselves.” A revenging female contradicts traditional (submissive) notions of femininity, going ​“against gender” — and since antiquity, in dramas, men have been ​“terrified” of it.

Shakespeare’s own use of the theme tends to be complicated. Titus Andronicus and Hamlet are the revengers in their plays, but their characters are also studies in helplessness and madness. ​“In many ways, their gender is blurred or crossed with feminine” archetypes, Tassi said. But ​“elsewhere, Shakespeare’s women step up,” and when they incite revenge, they tend to set dramatic plots in motion, from Macbeth to Twelfth Night to Much Ado About Nothing to Merry Wives of Windsor.

“Shakespeare really took seriously women’s sense of justice,” Tassi said. ​“Their cries are heard from the stage” that ​“men do terrible injustices to women.” In a subversion of revenge as a corruption of justice, female characters are ​“using revenge to get justice.” This leads to some deeper questions: Can revenge do good? Can it uncover and address fundamental problems of domestic violence and oppression?

The Play House

As a theater professional, Power has continued to tap into Shakespeare to contend with present-day issues. She adapted Richard III to star a trans actor and took it to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where it was ​“like a bomb went off,” she said, thanks to ​“the dialogues and discussions that came from it.” So many people in the audience had never been around trans people, she said, and the play ​“gave voice to so many people” and ​“brought communities together” to ​“dialogue about these profound words. Power had no doubt that Shakespeare can ​“still speak to contemporary audiences.… There are no limits for what Shakespeare can do.”

Yet women and Black and Brown people are still underrepresented in Shakespeare as the plays are performed today, and they ​‘need to see themselves in this canon.” For Power, addressing these concerns was in many ways part of the canon too, in that theaters are allowed to revise and redress. Shakespeare’s productions were ​“always alive, with a live audience. It’s why it’s called a playhouse.” The plays in their original productions already relied on audience imagination to transform the stage into another place, and actors into other people. ​“I can play Henry VIII,” she said.

“This traditional playing with gender goes all the way back to the beginning,” Power pointed out — first because Shakespeare’s productions were all men, and then because women began cross-gendering traditional male roles, to scandal (in 1860) for usurping men’s parts. ​“There’s this whole history of women performing Shakespeare lost,” she said, but ​“it is a tradition,” including an all-female Shakesepare company active in the 1920s. 

“I hope we can keep that torch alive and pass it forward,” she said.

Splitting It 50/50

“Shakespeare is a container for the conversations we want to have,” Morosco said. At present, much of the prevailing conversation is about equity. For Morosco, this involved understanding theater as a ​“workplace” and Shakespeare as an ​“industry,” for both theater and academia.

This brought her to Shakespeare 50/50, co-founded with her partner, fellow theater professional Peter Simon Hilton. The idea began when Morosco and Hilton were starring together in a production of Much Ado About Nothing, Morosco as Beatrice, Hilton as Benedick, a ​“fiery” couple that ​“comes together in union.”

Famously, the play is thought of as a meeting of equals, but when Morosco and Hilton were memorizing their lines, they realized ​“he had five times as many lines as I did,” Morosco said. He had ​“so many more words,” and ​“often initiated” action and conversation. ​“You can see who’s initiating and who’s following.”

In Shakespeare’s time there was reasons for this. Beatrice would have been played by a younger actor, following an older actor’s lead. Morosco was essentially in the ​“apprentice” role, she said. ​“He had to start each new thought,” and ​“he had much more access to the audience” through direct address.

“We think of Benedick and Beatrice as equal,” but ​“Benedick has five soliloquies” and ​“Beatrice has one” and it ​“doesn’t have the button at the end of it,” the rhyme that all of Benedick’s have. ​“Once you see it, it’s so hard to unsee.”

Shakespeare 50/50, begun in 2015, proceeds from the idea that creating equity is about ​“starting with the play itself.” In Hamlet, 8.5 percent of the lines are spoken by women. The 50/50 version reallocates lines until the balance is 55/45 (the ​“to be or not to be” speech goes to Ophelia). It also seeks to realign power dynamics in conversation and action: who’s initiaing? Who’s responding? Who has more creative sway? The 50/50 versions keep the stories and ​“the most famous lines,” but ​“you might be surprised who says them, or what moment in the play they say them.” The versions allow producers to ​“champion equity” without sacrificing the playwright’s intent.

The 50/50 version of Hamlet premiered in the summer of 2023. ​“When we started this work in 2015, nobody wanted to hear about it,” Morosco said. Now ​“everybody does.” Versions of Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, and Macbeth are in the works. Morosco cited a World Economic Forum study showing that at our current rate of progress, the gender gap across a number of indicators won’t be closed for another 95 years. They are hoping to do their part in shortening that time frame.

Who Has The Power?

Goodheart noted that in the three panelists’ conversation, ​“everything had to do with power and the shifting of power,” when women take revenge, and when women find a voice and get to say and do more. ​“Each of you was talking about how the power shifts when the women start speaking.”

This led to a discussion of a double standard. There’s a ​“vilification that can happen” if ​“women speak too much,” Goodheart said. Tassi agreed, saying that women become ​“categories as monsters” when they step up, like Goneril in Lear. Goodheart noted a loophole: ​“if you dress up like a guy” — as happens a lot in Shakespeare’s plays — ​“you can say what you want and everyone listens to you. If you stay in a dress and say the same things, you die.”

The panel took its first question from the audience, about the effect onstage of women assuming men’s roles? This led to a discussion of The Taming of the Shrew, which can read, on its face, as well, pretty misogynist. Yet Power directed a Taming of the Shrew in 2009 that reversed cast because ​“I had far more female actors in my community.” The gender reversal made the play enjoyable again as it brought out the comedy, especially as the actors dressed in the gendered clothing of their characters. ​“Who’s getting tamed here?” Power asked. It was ​“hilariously fun.”

Goodheart nodded at ​“the shifting to lighten things,” and noted that cross-gendering King John had a different effect, as the male actors accustomed to Shakespeare suddenly found themselves powerless. ​“The men were all outraged,” Goodheart recalled. ​“I didn’t have any language! I couldn’t do anything!”

Another question from the audience was about how to create more opportunities for women directors. Goodheart began by pointing out that some progress has been made. ​“I never once fought about being an artistic director,” she said, because the generation before her paved the way for women in leadership roles in theater. ​“These are the women who changed the world so we could have the jobs,” she said. ​“We stand on the shoulders of women who were doing it under incredible duress.”

But all agreed that ​“the work’s not over,” as Morosco put it. ​“It’s still ongoing.” Morosco recalled guest-directing at a theater that told her ​“we’ve only had one woman director here and it didn’t go well” — as if all the male directors had been outright successes.

All also agreed that theater itself had a role to play in pushing for greater societal equity. ​“We should be experimenting,” Power said. ​“We’re the place to expand the boundaries or erase them completely. We should be leading the way.”

“We are in New Haven. We present plays for our entire community. Why wouldn’t our community be on stage?” Goodheart said. ​“We have had racial and gender parity on our stage for the past 10 years. It’s not DEI. It’s just the way it is.”

They also broached the idea of contending with the complexities of the plays as they stood. ​“Why can’t it be difficult?” Goodheart said. ​“Why can’t people be outraged?” How might that be used as a way to further the social conversation, about the current roles and expectations of women and men, of wives and husbands, of mothers and fathers? It was all in the service of, as Goodheart put it, ​“using gender as a lens to look at Shakespeare, and using Shakespeare to look at gender.”