A tribute to Tina Packer, founder of Shakespeare & Company
On May 31st, I watched the online memorial service for Tina Packer, the driving force and founder of Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts. It was two and a half hours of joy, celebration, tears, humor, respect, and resilience.
So many people took a turn at the microphone. Family, friends, assistants, community leaders, politicians, teachers, actors, lawyers, financial advisors. Each one offered a window into a life of passion and seeming contradictions. Each one described a different facet of Tina, funny, fierce, visionary, demanding, generous, impossible, irreplaceable.
The final speaker hit hardest.
Courtney B. Vance, Emmy winner, Tony winner, one of the most respected actors of his generation, took the microphone last and described himself as a young man who knew nothing when he first encountered Tina Packer. He credited two seasons at Shakespeare & Company, and Tina’s belief in him, as the foundation of everything that followed. It was an eloquent, emotional finale that brought the whole two and a half hours into sharp focus.
This is what she built. Not just a theatre company. A place that transforms people.
I know something about that.
I trained at Shakespeare & Company during the Winter Intensive in January 2015. The days ran from ten in the morning to ten at night, with breaks for meals and two fifteen-minute rests. It was immersive, demanding, and unlike anything I had experienced as an actor.
Tina taught some of those sessions herself. I never had a private moment with her that I can specifically recall, though she was genuinely accessible to students. What I remember is something harder to describe than a single conversation. When Tina led a class, the room changed. The teachers and staff who worked alongside her every day held her in a kind of reverence that you could feel without anyone saying a word. She was serious, funny, assured, and forceful in presenting her ideas. I was in awe. I was also invigorated in a way I hadn’t expected.
One could feel the weight of the knowledge she conveyed.
That fall, I returned to S&Co. for Women of Will, a course built around Tina’s recent book exploring Shakespeare’s female characters across his career. I came back specifically to work with her. Instead, I arrived to find that she was ill. She was also, characteristically, performing every evening in a play about Joan of Arc, where she played Joan’s mother. She was able to teach the first session before needing to step back from the daytime classes to conserve her energy for the stage.
I understood that. Any actor who has pushed through illness to honor a commitment understands it. The show must go on, especially when there are no understudies.
Dennis Krausnick, her husband and the Director of Training at S&Co., stepped in to teach the remaining sessions. And here is where the story folds back on itself in a way that still feels like more than coincidence.
Dennis was the reason I was there at all.
In the Fall of 2014, he had led a Shakespeare & Company weekend intensive in Los Angeles that convinced me to make the trip to Lenox in the first place. His teaching of the company methods had opened something in me. Now, in Tina’s absence, he was there again. Our existing connection made the transition feel natural and softened the initial disappointment.
During that fall course I chose Lady Macbeth’s monologue, “unsex me here,” to explore what it feels like to embody and portray a character of a different gender. It was exactly the kind of challenge S&Co. encouraged. Risk. Discomfort. Discovery.
That is Tina Packer’s legacy in practical terms. Not a monument. A method. A way of approaching Shakespeare that insists on full human presence, your presence, your emotions, your body, your life brought into contact with the text.
Courtney B. Vance built a career on what he found there. I found something too, a different way of working, and a deeper understanding of why I keep coming back to Shakespeare after all these years.
She built something that outlasts her.
That’s not a small thing. That’s everything.
Did you ever study at Shakespeare & Company, or has a teacher or mentor changed the direction of your creative life? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
Cl