Virgins to Villains: My Journey with Shakespeare’s Women

Virgins to Villains: My Journey with Shakespeare’s Women is a fairly accurate title for what you’ll see in my show. I am primarily a professional actor, and over the span of my career, I’ve been lucky enough to have appeared in 61 productions of 30 different plays by William Shakespeare, performing 51 female roles, 29 male roles and 2 … airy spirits (and hopefully still counting). I have done many other plays by other authors too in my career, but I have a particular passion for Shakespeare, and an even more particular passion for Shakespeare’s female characters.

Over the years, I have followed many male actors who have written and performed one-person Shakespeare shows, but I have found very few women who have done them. I wanted to help fill that void. I decided to take my own life journey and put it through the prism of some of the female Shakespearean characters I have played, so you can see how they have resonated in my life.

If I was going to do this, I had several goals for the show: I wanted it to be enjoyable for people who know Shakespeare and for those who don’t. It needed to be funny and serious and universally relatable. Above all, I wanted to help demystify Shakespeare and make him more accessible to a contemporary audience.

Lastly, if you are curious about where the title Virgins to Villains comes from, it is this: As a female Shakespearean actor, you start out in your career playing virgins (and Shakespeare wrote some really fabulous ones), and near the end of your career, you graduate to older, more villainous parts. There again, he wrote some fabulous ones—but oh, how I wish he could have written more!

—Robin Goodrin Nordli