“Shakespeare’s Will” puts the grave in dramatic gravitas

What: Shakespeare’s Will
When: September 19-30, 2018
Where: Edmonton Cemetery (11820 107 Ave)
Playwright: Vern Thiessen
Director: Andrew Ritchie
Designer: Sarah Karpyshin
Featuring: Kristi Hansen, Ainsley Hillyard, Madelaine Knight, Kristen Padayas, and Rebecca Sadowski
Tickets: $25 general, $15 student/artist, available here. If cost is a barrier and you still want to see the show, contact [email protected].

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We all know Shakespeare, either through school or through the plethora of stage and screen adaptations of his works. He’s lauded as a literary genius — but we rarely think about his own life and relationships. Enter Shakespeare’s Will: a roving, site-specific memory play about one woman’s effort to define herself.

Shakespeare’s Will is narrated by Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s widow. It’s set in the aftermath of her husband’s death, and after the revelation that he left only his second-best bedroom furniture to her — nothing else.

The production is produced by Thou Art Here Theatre, whose specialty is producing plays by and about Shakespeare in unexpected places. I spoke with Thou Art Here’s Co-Artistic Director Andrew Ritchie over the phone, where I could hear bustling in the background of the crew setting up onsite at the historic 1886 Edmonton Cemetery.

Thou Art Here’s mission is to produce “site-sympathetic” theatre, meaning that there is some relationship between the venue and the text.

“We try to find a space that speaks to the play thematically,” Ritchie said, “And we try to find ways through the staging and the storytelling to really highlight that venue and to bring attention to it.”

Unlike in other productions of Shakespeare’s Will, the role of Anne Hathaway is being played by five actors.

“Being on this site you can really play with distance and the space in a way you obviously can’t in a theatre,” Ritchie said. “We had the opportunity to expand the universality of the story by seeing five different women play her at the same time.”

Award-winning playwright Vern Thiessen graduated from the University of Alberta’s now-defunct MFA program in Playwriting and is now the Artistic Director at Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre. Since its premiere at Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre in 2005, Shakespeare’s Will has been produced across Canada and internationally, including at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in 2011.

The role of women married to world-renowned men is a major theme of the show. Ritchie thinks the audience will be thinking about the imbalance between men and women then and now.

“Anne Hathaway is a woman who would have had a certain amount of privilege at the time, as far as women go,” Ritchie said. “Despite that and despite all the choices she’s able to make, she still ends up losing and getting screwed over by this man.”

Thou Art Here Theatre’s mission is to bring audiences into “unconventional spaces.” Founded in 2011, Thou Art Here has produced Shakespeare plays including Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night, but the majority of their productions are inspired by Shakespeare’s works, such as Kill Shakespeare, by Connor McCreery and Anthony Del Cole, and The Mechanicals, adapted by Neil Kuefler. Thou Art Here has performed in bars, playgrounds, community centres, street corners, and once each in the U of A’s own Rutherford House and HUB mall.

“We want people to see [the play] and to bring people into a space where people don’t generally enter,” Ritchie said. “Cemeteries are public places, just like public parks, and their doors are always open.”