Women adeptly playing more of Shakespeare’s male roles
“A bunch of guys playing girl parts? I think we’ve got some women who can play guy parts.”
So reflected American Players Theatre artistic director Brenda DeVita, having watched Mark Rylance as Olivia in a landmark, all-male “Twelfth Night” four years ago on Broadway.
If Shakespeare is truly universal (he is) and if his characters truly transcend time and place (they do), why can’t women tackle more of Shakespeare’s men, in plays with far more juicy male roles?
The answer is they can and have, for a long time. Legends Sarah Siddons (in the 18th century) and Sarah Bernhardt (in the 19th century) are among the women who’ve played Hamlet, long before Deborah Staples’ outstanding performance as the Danish prince at last year’s Illinois Shakespeare Festival.
For all that, it’s only been in the past decade that such cross-gender casting has really gained momentum, and there’s still been relatively little of it here in Wisconsin. One of the reasons Angela Iannone’s star turns as Henry IV (in a 2007 Milwaukee Shakespeare production) and Brutus (in Optimist Theatre’s 2016 production of “Julius Caesar”) stand out is that it’s still rare for women here to perform such roles.
It’s even more uncommon – and surprisingly controversial – for women to inhabit such roles while conscious of themselves as women rather than as women playing men.
Phyllida Lloyd met with skepticism when she staged the first of three such all-female Shakespeare productions in London in 2012. The venerable First Folio Theatre in Oak Brook, Ill., was criticized this summer when the relationship between a male clown and a shepherdess in “As You Like It” was intentionally staged as two women in a lesbian love affair.
But the tide is turning. By the time she’d concluded her all-female trilogy in 2016, Lloyd was winning raves. In the interim, Milwaukee’s Soulstice Theatre had staged an all-female “Macbeth” (2015) shedding new light on what it means to be a strong woman in a man’s world. In a few weeks, Chicago Shakespeare Theater opens an all-female “The Taming of the Shrew” set in 1919 among marching suffragists.
Two of the best plays I saw this summer at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival were the two parts of “Henry IV,” in which several rebels – including Hotspur, played as a woman in a lesbian marriage – were women. These casting choices shed new light on the rebels’ efforts to topple Henry’s teetering male dynasty, while challenging how we view Hotspur’s fierce determination to be taken seriously.
All the more reason to take heart when DeVita – a visionary who is transforming APT while remaining true to its core values – openly imagines APT mainstays like Colleen Madden as Hamlet or Tracy Michelle Arnold as Richard III.
As I wrote after watching the great Seana McKenna play Richard III in a 2011 Stratford production in Ontario, “the plum role of Richard – a consciously theatrical shape-shifter who must dissemble to get what he wants in a world where he is discounted because of his deformity – takes on an entirely different dimension when performed by a woman, in a play with a number of strong women characters who don’t get their props.”
Having watched her excellent, gender-bending work at APT as Viola in “Twelfth Night” (2012), one of the Dromios in last year’s “The Comedy of Errors” and Puck in this year’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” I can also readily see Cristina Panfilio as the title character in “Richard II” or “Henry VI.” Panfilio’s fellow Dromio, Kelsey Brennan, would make a splendid Prince Hal; so would APT actor Melisa Pereyra.
And so on. One can play such casting games forever; those of us passionate about APT regularly do. The point, here, isn’t to be prescriptive about who plays what, but rather to broaden the conversation so that we might be more open to all Shakespeare can be and all the ways he might challenge us to grow. Our best writer deserves no less. Neither do we.