21. Lisa Wolpe on Shakespeare and Gender

Paul speaks to the internationally acclaimed actor, director, and visionary, Lisa Wolpe, who continues to be at the forefront of the movement for gender parity and diversity in the arts with a special focus on Shakespeare and Gender.

Transcript

Paul Edmondson (00:00):

Hello, everybody, and welcome to Shakespeare Alive, a podcast of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. My name's Paul Edmondson, Shakespeare Alive hosts conversations with people who work with Shakespeare throughout the world. Today's guest on Shakespeare Alive is the internationally renowned theater artist, Lisa Volpe. She is a visionary who is leading the movement for gender parity and diversity in the arts with a special focus on Shakespeare and gender. She has given acclaimed performances of many of Shakespeare's male roles, including Richard II, Shylock, Hamlet, Richard III, Iago, and Cassius. She was the founding artistic director of the Los Angeles Women's Shakespeare Company from 1993 to 2016 and she's directed Shakespeare across the states at California Shakespeare, Colorado Shakespeare, Shakespeare & Company, Sedona Shakespeare, and at many universities, and for the Prague Shakespeare Company and all this with her keen eye on gender, race, and sociopolitical power. She is a pioneer and we are honored and delighted to welcome her to Shakespeare Alive. Lisa, welcome.

Lisa Volpe (01:29):

Bless you. Thank you. So happy to be with you, Paul.

Paul Edmondson (01:32):

Hey, what was your route into Shakespeare and what did you find there?

Lisa Volpe (01:37):

Well, the first Shakespeare that I did was with Eric Christmas, an English actor who taught at the University of California, San Diego. I think I was 17 when I met Eric. And then I went to Shakespeare & Company in Western Massachusetts, I think when I was 19. It was the second intensive that they ever led, a month long professional program for students. And there I met Tina Packer and Merry Conway, my clown master, and Kristin Linklater, the voice diva, and John Barton, the movement expert, and Neil Freeman. Some of my most interesting mentors that just changed my life at that time. And also Natsuko Ohama, who became one of my most important collaborators in my life. It was only a couple of years later that Kristin Linklater started the Company of Women, which was an international all female multicultural company. And we would, for several years, work in universities as mentors to the female faculty and the girls in those communities. In exchange, we were able to workshop our ideas. And our first big production was Henry V and I played Henry, which we did at Shakespeare & Company and at Smith College. I think Tina Packer helped find that funding for us.

Paul Edmondson (02:59):

Can you just talk a little bit about your memories of preparing for Henry V, what it was like when you were performing, the reactions to your Henry V?

Lisa Volpe (03:09):

Well, I remember the play started with me whacking a tennis ball because of muck, muck, muck in little shorts, little white shorts against the wall. And then it segued into dressing in my regal robe and playing chess with Kristin Linklater as Exeter and her first move was to upend the board. She smacked the board upside and the pieces went everywhere, and she was a very powerful Scottish woman and I was young. I was in my twenties and the challenge was right there in the room, bring it or you can't play this role. So it was an interesting show in which we were an all female company and the director, Maureen Shay, really wanted to reveal our femininity. So I was playing Henry in a skin tight Donna Karan leather vest. And the dauphin was this beautiful Belgian woman who wore a cat suit. And Patrice Johnson, a fantastic black actress, was playing Catherine of France. And so the power in the women was intense and there was nothing masculine really about it.

Paul Edmondson (04:20):

I think was this the first time you'd played a male character in Shakespeare?

Lisa Volpe (04:24):

The first time I experienced my masculinity was playing Viola when I was 19, Viola and Cesario. And I remember sitting in that rehearsal moment thinking, "I am all genders. I've always been all genders. I'm androgynous [inaudible 00:04:40]." A thing which now has a name, but then did not. It was common for people to stop me on the street, that I didn't know, and ask me if I was a boy or a girl. But really we were looking at the pattern of tyranny since the Christian male system went into place. Do you know what I mean? And writing about it and thinking about it. So dropping it in, I would feel very connected to Patrice Johnson, who's a gay woman, and I could completely respond to her as a potential love partner, someone that I thought was magnificent.

Paul Edmondson (05:17):

This is the Catherine of France?

Lisa Volpe (05:18):

Catherine of France. I thought, "She's brilliant. She's gorgeous. She's my friend. In the role, she's magnificent." I'm always-

Paul Edmondson (05:27):

I'd love to have seen you in act five, both of you together, that wonderful courtship scene.

Lisa Volpe (05:32):

Well, this is where it changed, Paul. Because in rehearsal, I found this glee and joy. I would've seduced her, I would build a willow cabin at her house. But then our director got involved and she said, "Now, my vision is I want you to disassociate. When your father dies, you disassociate, God becomes your father, put the blinders on. You are now much like Bolingbroke. You're going to move forward through the play throwing this guy under the bus and that guy under the bus. Betrayed by this man so now your revenge is not to trust anyone, and hang your friends, and say goodbye to [inaudible 00:06:12] staff." And that's not what my heart wanted, but my head was now being asked to control the experience so that instead of coming in like Kenneth Brown [inaudible 00:06:22] with a rough grin and a cheeky attitude and maybe a potential love stor, I was to come in and not play any of that and just play my agenda of unifying Britain under one God. So I did Henry V and the next year I started my own company in Los Angeles and began the practice of actually transforming myself into a masculine silhouette so that I don't play Hamlet as a woman, I play Hamlet as a man. When I play Shylock, I put a beard on. You can't tell that I'm a female.

Paul Edmondson (07:00):

Were you playing Henry V as a woman or as a man?

Lisa Volpe (07:03):

Neither.

Paul Edmondson (07:04):

Neither.

Lisa Volpe (07:04):

Because the text was masculine, my form was female. No one in the room was pretending that they were not who they were. So if you were a clown playing Bard Of, or Pistol, or Nym, you might put a spaghetti colander on your head for a helmet and be yourself doing it. And many people do that now. They say, "My gender's unimportant."

Paul Edmondson (07:28):

What were the other milestones along the way? Because I named them at the beginning, some of those astonishing roles. In the whole of dramatic literature, you've played them. You've brought Shylock to life, and Richard II to life, and Richard III, and Iago for goodness sakes. And it seems to me that you are continuing to learn about yourself, about gender, about Shakespeare. And I wonder what some of these milestones have been for you and what you've learned there.

Lisa Volpe (07:58):

Well, Natsuko Ohama, who's Japanese Canadian, the premier voice teacher now that Kristen Liz passed on, was my basics teacher at Shakespeare & Company. And then after the workshop, my then husband and I moved to New York and I studied with all of the master teachers in New York. And so we had a group of people together and I'd already played Rosalind and Viola, I was too young for Hermione. There's not much else to play. And Natsuko had me play Malvolio and I fell in love with playing male characters. Now, she's very much a wizard. And when I asked her how to play a man, she said, "Just watch basketball." So I did what she said, and I could see the way they moved in their bodies and I looked at the way men, and I would imitate the way that they would work in that athletic, exciting, leg strong way. That was part of it.

              But I was also raised to be a good girl. I was in the Canary Islands and in Germany when I was a child, and you had to stand up and give the right answer and be correct, and then sit down and be polite. And when I went to Shakespeare & Company, there was a woman called Merry Conway, M-E-R-R-Y, who was the clown master for the company. And it was then, because I just adored her work, the clown work is very heart opening, that I stopped doing Shakespeare for a number of years and I only did clown. I just worked on my body's knowledge, my listening body, and opening my heart and trying to find something other than getting it right, which we used to call the glorious failure with a ring of fire. And it was there that you found that after the fart jokes and the easy comic bits, you had to go to a real place of truth in order to elicit sympathy or empathy from your group of people listening.

              And I went to San Diego, where I'd gone to college and my husband had a house where we could stay, and brought several of the troop members there and I wrote an original play in clown called Parsifal, which as you know is the grail myth of compassion, and that won an award for me as playwright. And it was also original work based on what I think is important in Shakespeare, which is this sacred wisdom that comes in at the heart and beats at the heart with the poetry and it has, as its intention, enlightenment to turn lead into gold, to turn people into containers of light. And so having followed the clown work, I wrote a grant to do Romeo and Juliet in pure clown because I had seen two people that I loved, Kevin Coleman and Susan Dibble, who were Shakespeare & Company actors, do the balcony scene in red nose clown, few or no words, but a beautiful scene.

              And I said, "I want to do the whole play like that. I want to play Romeo." And then I started to try to cut the text and I realized I was in love with the words and I didn't want to cut the text, I wanted to actually play Romeo. And so I started the Los Angeles Women's Shakespeare Company in 1993 in a 50 seat theater, playing Romeo in an all female cast with Natsuko Ohama as the friar and Fran Bennett as the nurse. And we sold out and the audience went bananas, the estrogen in the room, the excellence of our work. We were text bunnies. There wasn't a semicolon on earth, but there was also this powerful, sensual, exciting female voice that I'd never seen. And it was also not a white company, it was 50% not white as often I would cast multiculturally in 1993. So the audience was immediately integrated and there was this female empowerment on stage, and also the box office was doing very well.

Paul Edmondson (11:59):

My face and my heart are smiling as you say all of this. It's just astonishing and beautiful to listen to.

Speaker 3 (12:06):

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Paul Edmondson (12:38):

You use the word alchemy in relation to what you do with gender in performance, and your one woman show, which is called Shakespeare and The Alchemy of Gender, which was in part written, I'm proud to say, in Stratford-upon-Avon. I've seen it a couple of times and it's astonished me on both occasions. Could you tell us a little bit about it and what it means to you personally? Because it's very, very personally rooted, that story, that presentation. And how it's evolved.

Lisa Volpe (13:09):

I began an MFA program, virtual learning for the most part, but we would spend eight days at Goddard College in Vermont with a cohort of 12 people. And you could pick your own mentor and decide what your curriculum was, what your reading list was, and what you were seeking. The motto of the school was, "At the heart of your mind." And in my second semester I picked a Jewish lesbian rabbi who started to question me about my life. And she said, "So your father committed suicide when you were four, he was Jewish?" I said, "Yes, I don't know anything about him. My Christian side of the family, my mother's side of the family, doesn't speak about him so I don't know." And she said, "Well, is it possible you're antisemitic?" And I said, "I don't think so. We're Democrats, we vote."

              And then I looked at the situation and I realized what was really bothering me was the taboo of speaking about the dead, speaking about suicide, speaking about why people fall into despair, and in my own life, the pushback on me trying to speak the truth of the world as I see it has always created me this ferocious desire to speak the truth even more clearly. I want not to be stopped in that way. So I began to write and I put on an all female As You Like It and I played Jacques, and cowboy version, and there was a woman in the audience who was a millionaire and she had started a foundation called the Gaia Foundation. And she saw me and her friend was playing Rosalind so she realized what a benefit it was to human beings who were female to liberate their internal terrain through Shakespeare.

              And she called me at home and she said, "I have a program and I'd like you to visit me. I'm going to give you a house in Provincetown, $600 a week, a round trip airfare, a brand new computer to work on for a month and you don't have to show me anything." I'd never had that before, a place of my own to write. And I went to Provincetown and I began to write this piece about what I believe and what I've done in my life. And my friend who runs the Provincetown Women's Theater Festival came over for a cup of tea and she said, "I am starting a women's theater festival right here in Provincetown, and if you finish this by the end of the month, I'll give you $1,000 and a chance to perform it right here in Provincetown."

              So the original story was two and a half hours long with no intermission. My hair went white as I wrote it. And it contained my father's story, who was a German Jew who fought with the Canadians against the Nazis. My mother's story, who had multiple sclerosis and died when I was 14, also through suicide. The legacy of the LA Women's Shakespeare Company, everything we had learned, everything we had done, who did what, what woman had played this king and that, maybe too much. But that was the first draft.

              And then I took versions of it to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival where I've worked and Bill Roush gave me a venue in the Bowmer Theater so I could do it for 800 people. And I also did it in libraries in the community for 10 homeless people. I played it in different places. And then we had a Shakespeare conference, I think you were there, in Stratford some years ago. And I met the people who run the Spring Works Fringe Festival, and they said, "We are taking submissions. Would you like to bring your solo festival?" I said, "Great idea." International travel, a new out of town tryout. And they said, "Well, it can only be 55 minutes though." And that's when I engaged Laurie Woolery, who's a brilliant Hispanic, Latinx director who works at the Public now, to help me cut it and to put it on its feet. And I made it so that I didn't need anything but a bottle of water. I just had to remember the words. I didn't need a projection screen or a special outfit or props.

Paul Edmondson (17:30):

I can't wait to see this again. There's a version online. Is there a version online, Lisa?

Lisa Volpe (17:35):

Yeah, I have it online but I have actually shared it during the pandemic with maybe 30 universities and online, it's a depth charge and then I show up for a 45-minute question and answer afterwards on Zoom. And it was a way for people to really feel like they could have radical programming about gender and about solo shows and the impact that you can make as an artist when you go into a new direction with the work that we love.

Paul Edmondson (18:08):

As far as listeners to the podcast are concerned, are they able to access it in some way?

Lisa Volpe (18:12):

If you write to me at lisavolpe@gmail.com, I can arrange to share a link or to rent a link. So some friends I give it to and universities sometimes pay me $5,000. So there's a sliding scale and it's how I've survived, in a way, having intellectual property like that. But I haven't got it on a pay per view system, I might be able to create that. I haven't done it yet.

Paul Edmondson (18:35):

So stepping back, and you've been talking about this all the way through the podcast in some ways, but what would you say that your having played many of the leading male roles in Shakespeare has taught you about Shakespeare and about men?

Lisa Volpe (18:53):

Well, there's so many different men in the world, so many different kinds of men in the world. And well, first of all, Hamlet has 1,500 lines and Gertrude and Ophelia together have 350 lines. So the ability to actually play something with bandwidth and range and stamina and intelligence is the chance to reveal my own stamina and bandwidth and intelligence. So it is my conduit for my life purpose, which I would not have if I didn't play the male roles. And then playing things two and three times, so I've played Iago three times, Richard III three times, Hamlet twice, Shylock twice.

Paul Edmondson (19:41):

What do you hope you'll continue to achieve for your audiences and for yourself?

Lisa Volpe (19:47):

Well, I feel that the young people that I'm meeting and also the older people that I'm meeting can find a way to express themselves through Shakespeare, without throwing the baby out with the bath water. And if it means a little bit of rewriting or adapting, I'm okay with that. I'm not so much about translating it, although I've done a lot of the play on work. I think the original text is magic. The syntax, the choice of words, the invention of words, the poetry versus the prose, the songs, the invocation of divinity, bringing God into the room, through various names, Jove, Diana, Jupiter, bring God into the room.

              And that as above so below that there's a way of adding to the music of the spheres even now with our planet in crisis, that if humans can really resonate at the heart level and bring their actions and their words together and influence groups of people to feel their hearts and use their words, maybe we can save the planet. So I'm really interested in saving the world. I don't need the applause, I need to save the world and the people in it, but we've already eradicated 90% of our species. I feel like if all of us speak Shakespeare to our communities and communities gather, that we, as people, can wake up our desire to love, and live, and save the planet, and save one another, and save the arts. And I believe that arts and culture lead to strong democracies in healthier communities. And I think that we shouldn't throw Shakespeare out. I think there's a lot in it that's gorgeous and I don't-

Paul Edmondson (21:29):

And salt and the grit that's there. And a lot of that is around gender, isn't it?

Lisa Volpe (21:33):

A lot of it is around gender and a lot of it is around old systems of patriarchy, which as women rise all over the world into leadership positions, I think we want to support that. And there have certainly been a lot of very powerful men doing very dangerous things in leadership positions, especially in the last five years, Putin and Trump and everybody has their own politics, but for me, women and children and families are being destroyed and in the name of power and greed. And I think anything that enhances our sense of humanity and presence and soul presence and knitting together of that which is lost, that which is lost must be found, it is required that we do awake our faith.

              And this is a kind of non-denominational church, if you will, the church of Shakespeare where we can all gather and pray through songs and dances and words and community. And everybody should be in the room, it shouldn't just be white men. Everyone gets to be in that room and every country. And because we have the internet now, we can share it instantaneously. Whereas, when I was a kid or 40 years ago, we worked alone in silos. If it wasn't in the newspaper, I didn't know about it. If it wasn't in a book, I didn't know about it. But these podcasts you can listen to when you're going for a walk in the woods, and hopefully will share it with people who will get inspired to start their own new ways of including the people in our world in the Shakespeare practices.

Paul Edmondson (23:15):

This has been an inspirational conversation, Lisa, and you're thinking about the future and how to preserve things. Imagine, if you will, the collections and archive preserves things, a great collection looks after artifacts for those who are yet to be born. If you could deposit something in Stratford-upon-Avon, I know it's a special heart for you, in the collections of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, what would you deposit and why?

Lisa Volpe (23:47):

I would put the digital copies of all the 40 years of work that I have of multicultural female and trans Shakespeare. I did in London with the young Vic and Kings College, all scenes from Shakespeare, with all genders and trans people. I have multicultural all female Shakespeare beginning in 1993, even to this year, and it will go forth. I have also photographs, letters, reviews, analyses. Dr. Katie Brokaw at University of Merced did 60 interviews, she had her students do 60 interviews with colleagues of mine, which she has transcribed, firsthand witnesses of people whose lives were changed by doing this work, their memories of what it did for them. And if there was a place for the legacy of my efforts and the efforts of the more than thousand women and girls and the trans people and the men who have done this transformational work with us, I would be grateful if scholars and future generations could access it at Stratford-upon-Avon.

              Because I'll tell you, Paul, it was the first excellent Shakespeare that I ever saw as a teenager. I went to London when I was 17, I saw theater every day. I traveled up to Stratford-upon-Avon and saw a play there, it was Henry V, I think, I'd have to look. I think it was Henry V. And since then to be friends with you and Stanley Wells and the glorious people of the Shakespeare community, the International Shakespeare Community. As you know, the International Shakespeare Community are my friends and also the people that I most want to influence because they hold the keys to the next generation of practitioners. So I would put in everything that I have. I would give you everything I have and let it be placed in a vault that's accessible.

Paul Edmondson (25:39):

It's a good job this is audio only because I'm in tears right now, listening to you. I want to bless you and thank you for your beautiful and good intention of that gift. And thank you for this inspirational conversation. Our audiences can find out more about you if they go to lisavolpe.com and there they can find trailers and clips of some of your work and a bit more about how you've been working and your current projects. And thank you very, very much indeed for joining us on Shakespeare Alive. We wish you well and we look forward to hearing about how you continue to break new ground. You've got the Prague Shakespeare Company this summer and all that will lead onto.

Lisa Volpe (26:26):

So much ahead and thank you, Paul, for being a huge influencer in my life and being a center for so many people who want to be educated and uplifted, I'm grateful and I have profound gratitude for this podcast opportunity.

Speaker 3 (26:39):

Thank you for listening to this episode of Shakespeare Alive with Paul. Join me next week when I talk to Evie Gurney, costume designer, who recently worked on the National Theater's production of Much Ado About Nothing. If you'd like to find out more about the houses, collections, research, and education activity at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, then please head over to our website, shakespeare.org.uk.