Review: Shakespearean Women Compete to Be the Alpha of the "The She-Wolves"

 The She-Wolves

Written, directed, and conceived by Kate Mueth

Choreographed by Kate Mueth and Violet Spann

Presented by The Neo-Political Cowgirls at The 14Y Theater

344 E 14th St., Manhattan, NYC 

January 10-February 1, 2025

The cast. Photo by Owen Benfield.
Currently in repertory at the 14th Street Y as part the Femme Collective’s three-company collaboration, The Neo-Political Cowgirls’ The She-Wolves voices one of Shakespeare’s silent women, the sorceress Sycorax, mother of The Tempest’s Caliban. Though she doesn’t appear on stage, Sycorax (voiced by director and playwright Kate Mueth) precipitates the play’s action by initiating a pageant-like competition for her successor among eight of Shakespeare’s most famous female characters. The resulting production brilliantly highlights the challenges women face even when given the opportunity to break out of their narrowly prescribed societal roles.

Sycorax’s announcement of the competition seems to reanimate the eight women, who have been on the periphery of the stage during her introduction, hidden in black sacks that they shed as they come to life, revealing white or black corsets. Here and throughout the production, the company’s emphasis on dance shone. Following the introduction, each woman is spotlighted one after another, with her skills and attributes (including height and weight) announced by an emcee (Josh Gladstone). Each dances to a contemporary song that is intended to emphasize a feature of her character and then delivers famous lines from her play, either a pastiche of lines (as with Lady Macbeth or Juliet) or one of her more famous speeches (as with Kate Minola and Portia).
Photo by Owen Benfield. Featuring Annika Helgeson as Ophelia (left front) and Colleen Edwards as Lavinia (right front)
Tellingly, two women never speak, the Dark Lady of sonnets 127-154 and Lavinia from Titus Andronicus, underscoring how these women in particular do not have their own voices (in the case of the Dark Lady because sonnets only present the perspective of the speaker and in Lavinia’s because she is brutally silenced following rape through the cutting out of her tongue). But even the women who the production does voice never say anything of their own; rather, they are circumscribed by the words of the male playwright just as their skills are voiced by the male emcee. They only have limited means to resist, as Kate does when she flips her middle fingers following her seemingly sincere delivery of her character’s disturbing final speech from Taming of the Shrew, in which she acquiesces to her husband Petruchio.

Kate is the victor of the competition, dubbed Sycorax’s successor as the next She-Wolf. However, her joy in her victory is short-lived, for even after she fends off Juliet and Margaret of Anjou, both of whom try to take her scepter, she learns that her triumph results in the silencing of the other women, who will return to their original state of inertia despite her attempts to stop it. They have been pitted against one another all along, and even Kate’s new powers cannot do anything to lift up the other women.
The cast. Photo by Owen Benfield. 
Following the curtain call, the actors handed out slips of paper to the audience with the only new words these characters had in the production. From the Dark Lady, one read, “Because you cannot place me in your box of predictability does not mean I may not run free.” The message here is more hopeful than Kate’s lack of success in freeing the other women suggests. If one untangles the triple negative, this missive suggests that the Dark Lady has freedom of movement if nothing else; she is neither predictable nor constrained—she runs freely.

-Stephanie Pietros

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