You cannot love her. You tell her so. Must she not then be answered?
Make no compare between the love a woman can bear me and that I owe Olivia.
Femina Shakes is an initiative at the BU School of Theatre,
the annual gathering of an ensemble of women to put together a production of Shakespeare,
specifically to take on roles that they might not necessarily get to take on in traditional
casting in the professional world.
I love being able to come into a room and hear so many powerful female voices.
You know, we don’t even like really talk about like gender or anything, you know, we’re
all so comfortable with each other.
We never get to be in a room of all women, experimenting and playing and doing
whatever we want.
It’s nice to have a room full of women who all can really empower each other.
We’re all creating this thing together, we all have common vision, we all get to have
input on the sets and the props and the music, and that’s really cool.
Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.
This fall’s production is "Twelfth Night." This play is about people who have been at
sea, or who have been stranded or alone and what it takes for them to kind of bust out of that.
"Twelfth Night" is basically a musical. Like the way Shakespeare wrote it, it’s basically
a musical.
Yeah, the original has about 11 songs in it, written by Shakespeare.
One of the biggest things if you’re, like, doing a production of "Twelfth Night" is like,
“Are you going to use the original songs or are you going to throw in your own?”
We thought it would be a really fun opportunity to use ‘90s music.
This production of "Twelfth Night" is set in the ‘90s in this sort of grunge, post-punk
era when everything was about to change.
All of the students in this production were born in the mid-90s, and as millennials, they’re
confronting a very difficult moment about what life is going to be like as an adult.
[Singing] I don’t care if it hurts. I don’t care if it hurts. I want to have control.
[Singing] I want to have control. I want to have control.
I think a lot of the choosing of the music came from looking at Shakespeare’s song
and looking at what it says and the feelings it invokes in the scene that follows it, and
trying to find a song that will do that same thing.
[Singing] I want you to notice, when I’m not around.
Shakespeare’s language is in some ways it can really be distancing to audiences that
aren’t really familiar with it.
But if we’re sitting there like singing a song that audiences will know, like “Creep,”
you can connect to “Creep,” you know “Creep,” you know how “Creep” makes you feel.
[Singing] But I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo.
In the early ‘90s there was a real sense of mainstream versus alternative.
And I think this is a world of alternative that we’re living in, in Illyria, where
there’s a really strong sense of angst.
[Singing] I don’t belong here.
The youth of the ‘90s really owned the ‘90s, they took control of it.
And I think "Twelfth Night" is filled with characters who are all really youthful, pushing
against coming of age and coming into adulthood.
[Singing] Another turning point, a fork stuck in the road.
The song that we’re using to substitute for the famous come away death moment, which
is when Orsino and Viola listen to Feste sing and more or less fall in love, the sentiment
in that song, as in much of the play, is this idea that life is very short, and that
youth is the stuff that will not endure.
And in this moment we’re using a Green Day song called “Good Riddance.”
In this song Viola plays the violin, she’s playing her violin to say everything to Orsino
that she can’t say with her words.
I think Shakespeare would love this. Everyone argues that Shakespeare was just trying to
make something that was popular and entertaining to the masses at that time, so I think he
would love that we’re doing something that’s popular and entertaining to the masses at
this time.
We’ve changed the songs from the original, but the major speeches around them, or, you
know, complex emotional moments with the characters are absolutely preserved,
and so I think that sensitivity to the language juxtaposed with a kind of irreverence is really
fun and actually very poignant. It kind of pulls the play apart. And I think that’s
a really important piece of Femina Shakes.
[Singing] It’s something unpredictable, but in the end it’s right,
[Singing] I hope you had the time of your life.