Rebekah Maggor |
One of the ironies of Shakespeare’s achievement is that his women — female characters vibrating with psychological truth — were created by a man to be performed by men. So it’s interesting that gifted actress, playwright, and raconteur Rebekah Maggor has chosen to illuminate the past two centuries of Bardic performance through the parade of actresses who tested themselves in the roles. Her one-woman show,Shakespeare’s Actresses in America , runs Sunday through Tuesday through August 29 at Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater on Cape Cod. Delivering snatches of speeches by Juliet, Portia, Viola, Kate, and Lady Macbeth spoken in the melodious (or not) tones of stars of yesteryear and the present, and moving on to a pair of female Hamlets speaking “To be or not to be” (“Être ou non être” in the persona of Sarah Bernhardt), Maggor is by turns majestic, thrilling, no-nonsense, and reflective of changing audience attitudes as she drives by the different characters. What’s missing is a fuller exploration of any of them and more attention to the larger-than-life personalities who gloried in the adoration of their fans.
Maggor serves as narrator too, taking on the persona of Margaret Webster, a mid-century actress, director, and Shakespeare scholar who mentions in passing that she staged the incendiary 1943 production of Othello with Paul Robeson opposite a young Uta Hagen. What Maggor’s Webster neglects to tell us about is the raging affair between Robeson and Hagen, whose husband, José Ferrer, played Iago. (The actress, on the cusp of her fame, went on to become one of the most important acting teachers of her era.) Neither does Hagen’s Desdemona make it onto Maggor’s hit parade.
Elizabeth Taylor delivers Kate’s final speech from The Taming of the Shrew peevishly, but the juicy details of the battles between Taylor and husband Richard Burton, the more important Shakespeare performer (who ruined his reputation running after her), is not mentioned. Maggor’s vocally distinct readings as the various actresses, from Julia Marlowe to Helen Hayes to Eva Le Gallienne to a Valley Girlish Claire Danes, suggest that the performances had as much to do with egos writ large as with Shakespeare’s poetry.
Clocking in at 55 minutes, Shakespeare’s Actresses has room to develop from lecture demonstration into more of an evening’s theatrical entertainment. In the final segment, Maggor employs some costume pieces and props that spur the imagination. Dressed in a white trailing robe, her hair flowing as in the famous portrait, she ends with the divine British actress Ellen Terry, syllables rounding, eyes rolling, as Ophelia going mad. This is such stuff as dreams are made on.
