Women's Shakespeare in Seattle: Regional Performance and Spectatorship

Abstract:This article considers how companies, actors, reviewers, and audiences shape narratives about Shakespeare, gender, and race when staging, viewing, and discussing the many all-female and nonbinary productions changing the landscape of local Seattle theater. The shows of upstart crow collective and Rebel Kat Productions disrupt myths of Shakespearean universality, manifest regional responses to countrywide political events, and provide an embodied experience in which to respond to and process national traumas. Attention to spectator narratives about upstart crow's Bring Down the House (2017) and Richard III (2018), as well as Rebel Kat's Coriolanus (2017), reveal evolving regional attitudes toward Shakespeare in the context of political events; local desires for gender-inclusive theater; and local obfuscations of the meaning of race in performance.