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Tina Packer knows Shakespeare. She’s directed every major Shakespeare play and is the founder and artistic director of Shakespeare & Company, which she has built into one of the largest and most critically acclaimed Shakespeare Festivals in North America. Her latest project is a staggering, five-part, on-stage examination of every single female character in Shakespeare’s cannon. If it sounds like a daunting task, it is. But it’s widely believed that if there is one woman in the world who could pull it off, it’s Tina Packer. She joins us to discuss Women of Will, running this month at Central Square Theater.

See the video on WGBH.org

Shakespeare and Company founder Tina Packer has always been fascinated with the Bard’s leading ladies. Packer explores all of Shakespeare’s female characters in her new show, Women of Will.

See the video on WGBH.org

LENOX, Mass. — Because Shakespeare’s Juliet is so irresistibly star-crossed, love-drunk and young, people tend to forget just how intelligent she is. Not Tina Packer. Portraying the female half of tragedy’s most popular double-suicide act, at the Founders’ Theater of Shakespeare & Company here, Ms. Packer glows with the energy of a quick, bright mind discovering — and enjoying — itself.

When this Juliet asks her Romeo (Nigel Gore) not to swear by the moon in the balcony scene, she’s not just dreamy and swoony. She’s playfully but sincerely considering the implications of every word she speaks. You sense a natural poet examining all the images she uses from all angles, as if not to do so would be irresponsible. What Juliet is feeling here is too deep and potentially dark to be expressed lightly, and language has never felt more important to her.

Juliet, of course, never makes it to the age of 14; Ms. Packer is past 70. Yet there’s nothing wince making about the marriage of septuagenarian actress and teenage character that concludes the first act of “Women of Will,” Ms. Packer’s lively and illuminating tour through a carefully selected gallery of Shakespeare’s heroines.

Read the review on NYTimes.com

Women of Will, The Complete Journey
, by Tina Packer
, with Tina Packer and Nigel Gore
Shakespeare & Company, Bernstein Theater, Lenox, Massachusetts
Through July 10, 2011

For lovers of Shakespeare and those new to or fearful of the bard, Tina Packer’s “Women of Will, The Complete Journey,” aka “WOW,” playing in Parts I-V on five evenings and matinees through July 10 at Shakespeare & Co’s Bernstein theater, is more than a wow—it is a tour de force for acting, conception, and for what theater was for the Elizabethans and what it can be now, but often is self-consciously not. These performances hold to the Elizabethan venue with imagination leading the way. The five parts illustrate a different theme, repeating in a sense the five-act dramatic structure of Shakespeare’s plays.

For theater: this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. I can’t stop thinking about what I saw, what I heard, what I learned. The cumulative experience, by the end, felt as if we all made appearance on the stage, and that the characters had been set spinning, not tightly wrapped, ready to be wholly identified and embraced again.

Read the review on BerkshireReview.net

Yesterday Tina “appeared” on WBUR/NPR’s On Point with Tom Ashbrook to discuss Women of Will. An excerpt from the 45-minute in-depth discussion and call-in segment:

“In many ways I’ve been working on this piece for the whole of my artistic life, and I have to ask the question: why should a 21st century feminist spend her time with a dead white male? Well, the answer is because I grow, expand, understand myself better with every play in the canon I immerse myself in, from young actor to director and teacher – and I have now directed almost every play he wrote. My awareness expands. He says things in such a way as allows me to understand the world – politically, psychologically, physically, poetically, philosophically – that change my personal life. He’s the man I would most like to sleep with, if you will – I’m really sorry he’s dead! And in many ways he ain’t dead. He infuses the world with life, and it’s all open to interpretation…”

Listen now to “Tina Packer’s Women of Shakespeare” at WBUR and NPR – On Point with Tom Ashbrook.