Shakespeare’s Margaret takes center stage
Whitney White’s trajectory from MFA to CAA happened fast.
After earning a Master of Fine Arts from Brown University in 2015, she is now represented by Creative Artists Agency, a talent juggernaut in the entertainment world.
Her degree is in acting, but directing earned her a Tony Award nomination in April for Jaja’s African Hair Braiding. Now, her play By the Queen is in rotation at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival through Aug. 31, under the direction of Shana Cooper.
By the Queen, subtitled “A Survivor’s Tale,” contains plenty of the Bard’s lines and scenes, which White uses to craft a sophisticated psychological study of Queen Margaret of Anjou, captured on the same battlefield as Joan of Arc. She is also one of the only characters to appear in multiple Shakespeare plays.
“Shakespeare isn’t the Bible,” says White, so it’s adaptable and applicable to today. To punctuate the point, she immediately pierces the fourth wall as the main character struts toward the audience and says, “Hi there. Oh, don’t be shocked. I can see you and I know that you see me.”
Margaret, for whom Shakespeare coined the term “she-wolf of France,” gets airtime in four of his so-called history plays: Henry VI, in three parts, and Richard III, which White’s script calls “one of the most epic — badass — stories ever written.”
This queen is also Shakespeare’s only female character to age chronologically. The script presents just about all of Margaret’s mentions, utterances and scenes from the original plays, shifting gears from old prose to modern English and back without hitting any speed bumps.
White divides her life into three roles: Margaret 1 (Malika Samuel), age 16 to her “dirty thirties,” according to the character description; Margaret 2 (Sarin Monae West), who makes dire decisions and suffers terrible consequences; and Margaret 3 (Nance Williamson), the only character in Richard III to confront the immoral king.
The play is framed as Margaret 3’s flashback during her final exile in France, where she enjoys wine and mulls her fourth and final act. She and the other Margarets are onstage together almost the entire time as they interact, question motives and revel in her/their ability to survive this tragical history tour through the War of the Roses in the 1400s.
White denotes the presence of “a lot of men. Too many men” in the four plays and dismisses their injurious affairs with comic effect: “blah blah blah politics, blah blah blah land, blah blah blah power.”
During battle scenes, the principals and minimalist ensemble (Bobby Moreno, Luis Quintero, Travis Raeburn, Stephen Michael Spencer) scream “waaarrrr!” and engage in madcap play-fighting antics as light and sound play along.
The script probes more than it preaches. Samuel’s note-perfect Margaret 1 almost hijacks the show based on her performance, not necessarily the lines. The character debuts as naive comic relief and ultimately evolves into a moral compass as Margaret 2 murders rivals, becomes a widow, watches her son get killed and is served her lover’s severed head on a platter, “medium rare.”
Yet the play never condescends into an anti-male screed and calls Shakespeare the “greatest writer who ever lived,” even as White subjects his words to inquiry, marshaling line after misogynistic line hurled at Margaret to examine his perspective onstage in real time.
This approach could easily devolve into dull academic deconstruction, but White handles these sections with nimble effect. Employing a hilarious herald (Jacob Ming-Trent) to condense the action and serve as a “purist,” she zeroes in on the pivotal characters and distills the four plays so well that minimal prior knowledge is required to follow along.
As Margaret 3, Williamson conveys the older queen with confidence as she inexplicably returns from banishment in France to confront Richard III. Otherwise, Williamson as narrator is the bemused, resigned, “resplendent elder” called for in the character description.
Margaret “is often portrayed as a crazy bag lady,” says Williamson, a troupe member since 1998 and a Garrison resident. “People ignored her because older women aren’t seen as valuable, but Shakespeare called her a prophetess and Whitney restores her dignity.”
Beyond intellectual entertainment, By the Queen is a call to action and an homage to White’s deceased grandmother, Mother Esther, mentioned in the play: “When was the last time you sought the wisdom of an elder?”
After Margaret 2 says that “any woman you see over the age of 45 has seen some [stuff] — okay?” the older iteration replies: “Women over the age of 60 … should be paid.”
Though White conveys a distinctive point of view, audience members must make their own conclusions about Margaret of Anjou and determine if they plan on reaching out to the female survivors in their lives.
Marc Ferris is a freelance journalist based in Croton-on-Hudson. He is the author of Star-Spangled Banner: The Unlikely Story of America’s National Anthem and performs Star-Spangled Mystery, a one-person musical history tour.