In Elizabethan England, William Shakespeare’s male actors often played women on stage. More than 400 years after his death, instead of men simply playing women, women are taking over the male roles in Shakespeare in the Dark’s production of “Pericles, Prince of Tyre.”
Shakespeare in the Dark is a College of William and Mary acting troupe that performs plays written by the famous writer. Production director Andi Nealon said “Pericles, Prince of Tyre” is a lesser-known tragic comedy about Pericles’ search to find a wife.
“There are pirates, evil kings and evil queens. There’s basically a nice adventure romp,” Nealon said.
The main difference between the original play and this production is that Pericles will be performed as a woman instead of a man. The actress playing Pericles, Sam Terry, said the character’s gender switch brings a new perspective to the work.
“When I started working on this proposal and reading Pericles last summer, I found that I was more compelled as a modern-day person if I read her as a woman,” Nealon said. “So the second time I read the play, I enjoyed it a lot more because it wasn’t just a guy being ‘I’m sad,’ it was a woman expressing her grief … I think it’s more meaningful if you add (the) layer of being a woman experiencing specifically female problems — especially where we haven’t changed the gender of her wife.”
Nealon said many of the characters in this play are stock tropes, so this change helps give the story more depth.
“We have cast a lot of roles as women, so it has become sort of a story about women making the best of things and sort of supporting each other through all these horrible things that happen,” Nealon said. “If it’s just men, they kind of tended to be ‘well that sucks,’ so we’ve shifted and altered it a bit, you can kind of play with the lines more.”
Terry said in many other of Shakespeare’s works, changing the genders of the roles wouldn’t work because that’s not how women would interact with other women.
“If you were to make Hamlet a woman, that would complicate a lot of the text,” Terry said. “One of the reasons I think Pericles works so well with this is because Pericles really, really loves her wife so much.”
“For anybody reading, this is a trait very common for women who love other women,” Nealon said. She added having the main couple being lesbians isn’t gimmicky, because Shakespeare in the Dark has lots of LGBTQ members.
“We need to acknowledge lesbians are real people and they’ve been around for a long time and even back in the old days they still existed and still loved each other as deeply as straight people,” Nealon said. “I don’t think at this point we should be calling it a social justice gimmick because we are just putting — a different kind of fictional people in a play.”
Nealon said another interesting layer to Pericles becoming a woman is she prays to Diana, the patron goddess of virginity and women, in the original play as well.
“Everyone in this play is like Diana, Diana, Diana which is so odd that (the play) is mostly populated by men — compared to other Shakespeare plays where the men will call on Jove, Zeus or Hermes or Apollo or Poseidon,” Nealon said.
Nealon said the only issue with changing the gender in the play was figuring out which pronouns to use.
“People were very confused when they were memorizing the script who the line was referring to,” Nealon said. “We have to decide if this line is referring to Pericles or is this line referring to a god or is it referring to the ocean because in the original text those three pronouns would be the same.”
Other than the pronouns, Terry said the lines in the play were pretty much left unchanged.
“We’ve just changed how the characters are interacting (with the lines), and how honest they are saying them,” Terry said.
A portion of Shakespeare in the Dark’s productions’ profits go to a charity of the director’s choice. Nealon said she chose the Texas Civil Rights Project, which helps reunite parents who have been separated from their children at the border.
She said a big part of the play’s story is Pericles trying to reunite with her own family and Nealon couldn’t direct a play with this theme and ignore what’s going on in the real world.
“(This play) has brought a lot of people together and hopefully through our donation, it will bring even more people together,” Nealon said.
Want to go?
The production will be at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 14-18 in the Commonwealth Auditorium of the Sadler Center, 200 Stadium Drive. Tickets are $6.
