Phoenix Festival DIGITAL Playbill 2024 (2) - Flipbook - Page 13
I don’t remember how I found out all the women in Shakespeare were played by
boys. It's sort of just a cultural joke, isn’t it? I really 昀椀rst considered it while watching Shakespeare in Love as a teenager. Yet at the movie’s conclusion Gwyneth Paltrow’s character gets to play Juliet. Something as holy and romantic as Shakespeare
cannot be muddied by something as bizarre as little boys playing women.
The lives of Shakespeare’s boy players are mostly a mystery. We know that about
sixty years after this play they were replaced by women and forgotten. History, too,
seems to want to forget them. When it is brought up the focus seems to be on the
absence of women rather than the presence of boys.
People love to fantasize that there were disguised women among Shakespeare’s
players but all the evidence supports the fact that Shakespeare’s great female roles
were all played by boys between the ages of 12 and 22. What did it mean to be
trained to be a woman at the age when we learn to become our assigned genders?
How did it feel to be a child asked to embody characters decades older than you
-asked to play love scenes opposite adults? And how did it feel, in your 22nd year
-the year I had just 昀椀nished when I started writing this play- to be violently thrust
back into a rigid, gendered world?
We will never get true answers to these questions, we can only ask them, as I have
tried to do in this play. And as we ask them I hope we ask the same questions of
ourselves. What does it mean to make theater? What does it mean to grow up? And
most importantly- what does it mean to try to be a man or a woman? Is it ever real?
Or are we always just playing a part? After all, life is just a play…a poet said that
once…or something like it…
With Special Thanks to: Elise Stone and Craig Smith, John Lenartz, Katia
Belousova, Reva and Carmela Senese-Grossberg, Jodi Senese, Veronique
Autophenne, Victoria Gau, and my grandmother who played all the trouser roles
at her all girls college and hated every single one.
