Shakespeare and the Alchemy of Gender
Created and performed by Lisa Wolpe
Directed by Laurie Woolery
A fearless, uplifting, and deeply personal one-person show
Co-sponsored with the Gender Studies Program and Notre Dame Film, Television and Theatre
Internationally renowned actor and Shakespeare scholar Lisa Wolpe has likely played more of the Bard’s male roles than any woman in history. From gender explorations to intergenerational trauma to the unforgettable story of her life, Lisa triumphantly illustrates that Shakespeare’s insight into the human condition is as relevant as ever.
This lyrical, fearless, and deeply personal one-person show is a quest for gender equality and women’s rights. Wolpe weaves Shakespeare’s monologues with stories of her family’s traumatic past. The play talks about Holocaust experiences, suicide, alcohol addiction, and sexual and physical abuse while eloquently using Shakespeare’s text to heal and create. The play may be best suited for prepared students able to handle the adult nature of the play.
Note: The performance will conclude with a 15-minute Closing Ceremony: Conversation with Community, where audience members are invited to ask playwright/performer Lisa Wolpe about the play and engage in conversation about its themes.
(Approximate running time: 60 minutes, plus a 15-minute Closing Ceremony.)
“Weaving monologues from her favorite male Shakespeare roles with reflections on her family history, Wolpe explores her fascination with upending gender conventions as a way to reclaim power in the face of a traumatic past.” —The New Yorker
From the Playwright:
Shakespeare and the Alchemy of Gender is dedicated to my father, Hans Max Joachim Wolpe, a German Jew who fought heroically against the Nazis in World War II. His family was arrested and killed at Auschwitz. He shot himself when I was four. This play is an offering to my ancestors.
Shakespeare’s words facilitate the exploration of the mystery of the afterlife, the frailties and consequences of human behavior, and seem to name a cosmic interconnectedness that touches and informs humanity. I’ve woven my own memories together with thoughts about my father’s life, adding fragments of some of my favorite texts from Shakespearean characters, male and female. I’m hoping to generate work that bodies forth empathy, understanding, and remembrance.
“If we can build empathy, we can invigorate the purpose of art, which is to create alliances that save lives and offer hope.”
Background Story
I wrote a thesis about why I perform the male roles of Shakespeare for Goddard College in Vermont, where I earned an MFA in Theater and Interdisciplinary Art in 2007. One of the ideas I wanted to explore was intimacy versus performance – who was I offstage, who was I onstage. How would I describe the liminal spaces between what I felt and thought when I played Shakespeare, in great roles like Hamlet, and who I was as a person, a queer female, a person that the patriarchy considered to be irrelevant. Who was I, what must I do while I am alive on this earth? How can I improve the lot of women who love to play Shakespeare?
I got a grant from the GAEA Foundation just after I graduated, which allowed me to go to Provincetown MA and write for a month in a little house that they provided, and they also gave me a little bit of funding so I could focus on the Heart of my Mind. A friend, Margaret Van Sant, who had gone to Goddard with me, was interested in my work, and when I told her what I was doing, she gave me a commission to perform the show I was writing at her Provincetown Women’s Theater Festival. That first iteration of the show was two and half hours long - with no intermission!
I wanted to write something personal for myself to perform, something that answered my personal question of “Why Shakespeare”. The material became a mix of autobiographical work, fragments of Shakespeare that I loved, and a lot of political, metaphysical, and feminist thought.
After performing a 90 minute version for several years, in which I had incorporated a lot of video and projections, in a script including a lot of material about sacred geometry, my all-female Shakespeare company (The Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company), and my mother’s experience as a victim of domestic violence, I was invited to perform the work in Canada at Stratford-Upon-Avon’s “SpringWorks Festival”- but the projects had a one-hour time limit.
That’s when I hired Laurie Woolery to help me cut the project down to a very portable one-woman show that just focused on walking in my father’s shoes. The more I contemplated the ghost of my father (Hans Max Joachim Wolpe) while I performed excerpts of Hamlet, the more the work drew me into musings about the afterlife, supported by Shakespeare’s sublime texts. The show you see now is dedicated to my father, influenced by Shakespeare, and has a depth of feeling that continues to prod me to perform it all over the world, in the hopes that listeners will tune into their lost ancestors and family members, and bring love to the departed, lightening the darkness that the forgotten ones are trapped in.
-- Lisa Wolpe