Tina Packer, who in 1978, founded Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Mass., died over the weekend. The acclaimed director, writer and actor was 87.
"Theater in New England was never more alive than when Tina Packer was involved in one of her myriad ways," wrote critic Ed Siegel, who interviewed Packer numerous times over the past 35 years writing about the arts for the Boston Globe, Berkshire Living magazine and WBUR.
"As founder and retired head of Shakespeare & Company in Lenox," Siegel wrote" [she was ] an extraordinarily gifted director, a take-no-prisoners actor, a provocative educator. "
In 2016, her theatrical exploration of Shakespeare's female characters became a book, "Women of Will: Following the Feminine in Shakespeare's plays."
Back then she told WBUR that in Shakespeare's later writing, he began to craft more for female characters, not making them dress as men and allowed them to start taking on the truth.
"And what he says in the late plays," Packer said, "is that you need at least one woman, but preferably 2 or 3 women, to put right the huge sin that has happened at the top of the play and that they redeem their fathers. But you also need something else too, which is the creative spirit."
In a tribute Packer's theater colleagues described her as "a fiery, force of nature." The world was her stage, Shakespeare & Company said in a statement, and "she furthered the Berkshires as a destination for the imagination."
