“Women of Will” is a show Tina Packer can take with her anywhere she goes, and you should want to be in the audience when she performs it. The following review was written after seeing Packer at the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival in 2014. She is about to bring her outstanding display of Shakespearean greatness to the Delaware Theatre Company for four performances, 8 p.m. Friday, January 29. 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, January 30, and 2 p.m. Sunday, January 31. Packer’s counterpart may not be Nigel Gore, but you’ll lucky if it is. This show combines magnificent acting with an appreciation of the literature being depicted. Do yourself a favor and see it. And get me, somehow, to Lenox to see more!
Book my trip to Lenox, Massachusetts. After seeing, and hearing, the magic Tina Packer can conjure using primarily language, movement, and attitude, I want to see anything theatrical in which she has a hand, including her work at the seasonal Shakespeare & Company repertory she founded in the Berkshires decades ago.
Luck, and probably the wisdom of artistic director Patrick Mulcahy, brought Packer, in tandem with actor Nigel Gore, to the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, where the pair is turning Packer’s show, “Women of Will” into a demonstration, and lesson, of how to maximize the brilliance the Bard provides and make it thrillingly immediate.
Packer begins by presenting the identical text from “The Taming of the Shrew” in three different ways that show the choices available to an actor and director in staging an early Shakespearean work that has become controversial because of the means by which Petruchio tames Katherine —…
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