By BEATRICE ANN GENCO
Most people can name at least one female character in a Shakespeare play: Juliet, Ophelia, Lady Macbeth … but few will come up with Margaret.
And yet, says Dan Morbyrne, 37, of Holyoke, co-founder of Real Live Theatre and co-creator of a new play about Margaret, she is the most compelling of all Shakespeare’s female characters.
But, who is she?
She is Queen Margaret of Anjou — the French wife of Britain’s King Henry VI and, therefore, a 15th-century queen of England.
Margaret is mentioned in four of Shakespeare’s plays (“Henry VI,” parts 1-3, and “Richard III,”) and, in those, combined, speaks in the neighborhood of 849 lines.
“When you take her role … in four different plays and extract it, she becomes the largest character with the most lines, but not a lot of people know about her — she is buried,” Morbyrne said. And though she makes multiple appearances in Shakespeare’s works, he adds, her character is poorly developed.
Organizers at Real Live Theatre in Easthampton say they hope to rectify that when they present their new play, “The Life and Death of Queen Margaret” this weekend and next at the Hallie Flanagan Studio Theatre at Smith College in Northampton.
The actors in the all-female cast are Myka Plunkett (who plays Queen Margaret), Linda Tardif, Jeannine Haas, Julissa Rodriguez, Kate Hare, Ellen Morbyrne, Fay Bobersky and Emily Tanch.
The director says her decision to cast only females is in keeping with the play’s feminist perspective.
The collectively run ensemble was founded in 2013, with a mission to “enrich and uplift the cultures of the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts,” according to its website.
It’s a tight-knit troupe, which values emotional respect and trust, says troupe member Toby Vera Bercovici, 32, of Northampton, the play’s director and co-author.
“We can go deeper more quickly and take more risk more immediately because we have that background together, which sets us apart,” Bercovici said.
The idea for the play was hatched by Morbyrne, a theater teacher, director, fight choreographer and co-founder of Real Live Theatre, who says he missed performing Shakespeare (the last Shakespearian play the ensemble performed was “The Tragedy of Othello,” in 2013).
“It felt like time we do another Shakespearian play,” Morbyrne said.
And yet, that’s not quite where he landed.
He already had an interest in Margaret, dating back to his teenage years, and as he perused the three parts of “Henry VI” and “Richard III” — all plays in which Queen Margaret figures greatly — he realized there’s enough juicy content about the queen for her to have her own play.
“She was a ruthless woman who raised armies to fight against her husband’s enemies,” Morbyrne said. These enemies, the Yorkists, threatened to take his throne and her son’s birthright.
Morbyrne asked Bercovici to help adapt Shakespeare’s texts and to direct. Together, they created the new play they describe on their website as “a patchwork of Shakespeare’s text as funneled and augmented by Toby Vera Bercovici and Dan Morbyrne.”
Bercovici is a visiting assistant professor of theater at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, and has directed many shows in the Valley, including at the Hampshire Shakespeare Company, the Serious Play! Theatre Ensemble, and Pauline Productions, as well as for Real Live Theatre.
“She’s a thought-provoking director who finds interesting ways to create a scene,” Morbyrne said.
In developing and writing the play, Morbyrne and Bercovici blended Queen Margaret’s lines from Shakespeare’s plays with text they created based on historical facts about Margaret’s childhood and her reign as queen, from 1445-1471.
By adding the historical context and background information about the Queen, Morbyrne says, they were able to develop a three-dimensional version of the woman, while maintaining Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter. What they have created they say, is a strong, feminist play about a strong woman.
Historically, Bercovici says, Queen Margaret was an educated, fierce, outspoken woman who played by the same rules as the men in court.
“She is vicious, and you cannot deny that but, so were the men, and she was vilified so much more because she was a woman,” Morbyrne said.
“She arguably has the most beautiful text in Shakespeare, however, he paints her primarily as a villain,” Bercovici added.
For example, in “Henry VI, Part 3,” Act 1, Scene 4, Queen Margaret offers her enemy, York, a cloth soaked in his dead son’s blood to wipe his face. Then says,
“Look, York: I stain’d this napkin with the blood … Made issue from the bosom of the boy; And if thine eyes can water for his death, I give thee this to dry thy cheeks withal. Alas poor York! but that I hate thee deadly, I should lament thy miserable state.”
Although Shakespeare attributes to Margaret unspeakable actions, he goes no further in revealing the queen’s character, or her motivations. That’s not surprising, really, Bercovici says: “Shakespeare didn’t write dramas or tragedies centered solely around a woman.”
In keeping with Morbyrne’s goal to fully develop the character of Queen Margaret, Bercovici devised a theatrical set for the play that physically represents the Queen’s body.
The mark of a good matrix, she says, is that it can influence all aspects of the production which includes stage movement, choreography, sound, lighting, and costumes.
“If the matrix [is] her body, then even when she is not in the scene, she is in the scene,” she said.
The set is made of six serpentine wooden staffs carved to resemble human bones.
Those “bones” are used throughout the play by the actors, doubling and tripling as representations of the physical world, including windows, stretchers, crosses, and weapons. Also, a cabernet-red cloth which is used frequently by the actors, also has multiple meanings: blood, for instance, and bedding.
In that vein, the distressed, neutral-toned costumes designed by Julia Vincenza Whalen of Northampton, give the characters a bruised-flesh look, and represent the queen’s muscles.
The play also features 15 choreographed dance sequences that show the passage of time and space and allow the characters to break out of the rigid movement required in royal court and engage with the fluid motions of the body.
The taped background music played by Northampton sound designer Ezekiel Baskin during the choreographed sequences, are rhythmic, resembling heart palpitations.
That corporeal design suggest the queen’s internal struggle with power, Bercovici says.
“It makes the swirling feeling of time and regurgitating memory of decisions solidify on stage, making [Margaret] seem relatable to the audience.”
Ultimately, Bercovici says, she and others at Real Live Theatre hope the play will lead to a dialogue about how women are portrayed, both in the past and the present.
“Sometimes it’s easier for people to understand what is going on at a given time by looking at the issues painted on a canvas of another time,” she said.
“The Life and Death of Queen Margaret” will be presented Friday and Saturday and Aug. 5 and 6 at 7:30 p.m. and July 31 at 2 p.m. at the Hallie Flanagan Studio Theatre in the Mendenhall Center for Performing Arts at Smith College in Northampton.
Tickets cost $15-$18 (with a sliding scale starting at $10). To reserve, visit www.reallivetheatre.net.