She plays the women who played Shakespeare's roles
When actress Rebekah Maggor was researching Shakespeare in a Harvard library in 2003, she stumbled upon a collection of recordings of famous actors and actresses performing Shakespeare, from 1890 through the 1950s.
''The first time I heard them, I was amazed by them," says Maggor, who was getting her MFA in acting at the American Repertory Theatre's Institute for Advanced Theatre Training. ''I had never heard these different styles before. I think we have a tendency to dismiss 19th-century acting as declamatory and old-fashioned. But the really great actors of that time had a spark, and when I started listening, my understanding of what's vocally and physically possible deepened."
Those recordings became the basis of Maggor's one-woman show ''Shakespeare's Actresses in America," directed by Dan Cozzens, which she'll present at ART's Zero Arrow Theatre next Monday through Wednesday. The piece re-creates the vocal and physical styles of nine famous actresses -- including Ellen Terry, Sarah Bernhardt, Elizabeth Taylor, and Claire Danes -- and reveals how acting styles have changed over the years.
For four performances, Maggor, 29, will transform herself into Margaret Webster, a 20th-century actress and director who gives a recital-performance in which she and the other actresses (also played by Maggor) perform scenes from Shakespeare's plays.
In one sequence, Maggor plays three actresses from different eras performing the ''Romeo and Juliet" balcony scene: From the late 19th century, Julia Marlowe; from the 1930s, Eva Le Gallienne; and Danes from the 1996 film with Leonardo DiCaprio.
''I never had the advantage of interviewing these actresses," Maggor says. ''I've read a great deal -- biographies, autobiographies, reviews, essays, etc., and of course listened to the recordings and collected many photos in order to get to know each woman."
''I would say their interpretations challenged views of how women should behave in the public sphere and what is considered feminine," Maggor continues. ''Marlowe really defied the traditional interpretation of Katherine in ''The Taming of the Shrew," which was as a nasty vixen. Julia understood her to be highly intelligent and sensitive. In 1905, she was really ahead of her time."
The process of creating her show also deepened her understanding of Shakespeare, she says: ''These actresses were the greatest interpreters of Shakespeare. They'd done these roles hundreds of times and knew Shakespeare from the inside, . . . in a way no literary scholar can understand."
Philip Thompson, an associate professor of drama at the University of California, Irvine, saw an earlier workshop production of ''Shakespeare's Actresses" in New York last summer. ''An exercise like mimicking a historical document of performance could become a dry affair. In fact it's not," he says. Maggor does ''a masterful technical job of discovering how she could make these women speak and move. The transformation is really remarkable."
Maggor, who's acted with directors Anne Bogart, Peter Sellars, and Andrei Serban, is also a playwright. She was named a Huntington Theatre Company Playwriting Fellow for 2006, and her play, ''Two Days at Home Three Days in Prison," will be produced this year in London, she says.
In addition, she's a voice and speech coach. She worked with Bill Irwin and Kathleen Turner on the Broadway revival last year of ''Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?."
''It's a vocal marathon; they do eight shows a week," she says. ''I was there to make sure they were healthy vocally. I was watching them to make sure they were giving their strongest performance and not getting in their own way."
Admission is free. Reservations: 617-547-8300, www.amrep.org/saa.
The timing is also right in other ways, says Dehnert. ''From war to disasters, there's a lot going on [in the world]," Dehnert says. ''A lot of people live with this strange feeling in their gut that there's something very wrong going on. And 'Hamlet' examines the question of revenge and a perceived wrong in a way that's incredibly personal and human. The play opens up a conversation about this issue of revenge in a way that's not preachy, political, or prescriptive. It doesn't give us the answer."
Runs through Feb. 26. 401-351-4242, www.trinityrep.com.
