The Most Excellent and Lamentably PC but Incompleat Tragedy of Shakespeare's Womyn (Without a Single Reference to Lady Macbeth); or What You Will

Brandeis Department of Theater Arts, Senior Festival
By William Shakespeare, Compiled by Sara Kenney
Directed + Designed by Andrew Child
​Lighting Design by Emily McCourt

This exploration of female characters in Shakespeare's plays featured two actors performing dozens of roles with interpolated projections. Below, is one of the projections that transitioned into an excerpt from Act V of Othello.

Check out the visual inspiration for ... Incompleat Tragedy... here.

Thoughts on directing Incompleat Tragedy...

    What I was most excited about with this project was the opportunity not only to approach Shakespeare's women as a collective but to address, deconstruct, and subvert the ways these characters have been packaged and reworked throughout history in order to make them palatable or even attractive through a contemporary lens. Thinking about Norma Shearer as Juliet, Asta Nielsen as Hamlet, or Sarah Bernhardt as Cordelia, it's fascinating how we allow our collective perceptions of femininity to color these iconic women. I've loved working around the power dynamic of directing actors who are ceaselessly more knowledgeable about Shakespeare than I, and who are ceaselessly more knowledgeable about the intricacies of womanhood than I. I am so grateful that both of them have lent so much of themselves to these fictional women and have wholeheartedly mined them for beauty, ugliness, power, rage, frustration, serenity, and strength.
     Incompleat Tragedy was a performance that culminated the research by Sara Kenney on the power structures navigated by women in Shakespeare and the ways they are presented in performance.
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Scenes in the piece were taken from the following works:
Henry VI, Part III
As You Like It
The Taming of the Shrew
Troilus & Cressida
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Twelfth Night
Othello
The Winter's Tale