Thursday, October 17, 2013
Playing Shakespeare’s Men
HowlRound: Though Shakespeare created around 798 male characters, his dramatic corpus contains only about 149 female ones. That's a ratio of roughly sixteen to three. Yet every year the best conservatories accept at least as many women as men—if not more—and every year they graduate both men and women trained to act in Shakespeare plays. The women are even trained to swordfight. Ninety nine percent of them never get to use that skill.
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2 comments:
I really appreciate the idea of just producing a quality Shakespeare production, giving women a chance to play roles they don't usually get to play and not worrying about feminist commentary. I think just initially this is a great movement for women and it allows great actors to really show their skills without worrying about what gender they are. I can completely understand not wanting to be seen as commentary on gender roles, but it is an inevitable factor in doing something like this. Honestly, I really like the whole concept and I don't think that it needs that extra political commentary. The author ends by saying, "I hope they'll turn to creating play-worlds in which women don't have to pretend to be men in order to be powerful." This struck me strangely. I honestly didn't think about the production of the plays by all female casts to be 'women pretending to be men' and this being he only way they can 'be powerful.' It made be a little frustrated. Aren't the women portraying these characters, even if they are men, showing how powerful they can be? Aren't the actresses showing their skills and power through these rolls without having to make a direct statement about gender? Anyway, I can see both sides and I think they would just be very different productions. I support them both but I also don't think you need to make something obviously political/racial/etc. to make a great production. I love the possibility of these issues emerging, hanging around in the background, but sometimes it's nice not to have it shoved in your face.
The directors stance on how changing the gender between the charters, was striking but great. I think it was one of the most interesting part of the whole article. Just like CMU's production of Oleanna with two females, i think by change characters gender we can find a great deal about gender roles contained in Shakespeare's text. I also believe that we can discover more about the people themselves as well and that gender swapping should extend beyond Shakespeare. Gender swapping could be done with any production of theatre and gender could become another thing decided by the director not the playwright.
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