Shakespeare helps actor find link to her Jewish forebears
By ALAN SMASON, Special to the CCJN
Playing non-traditional gender roles in Shakespeare has informed much of the artistic and scholarly career of Lisa Wolpe. The 57-year-old female interpreter of such traditional male roles as Hamlet, Romeo, Brutus and Shylock says she has found inner peace and joy in her performance work. She claims a world record for playing Shakespearean male roles as a female. Aside from the personal satisfaction of connecting with her audience, her unusual cross-gender portrayals have also permitted her to connect to her Jewish father, a man she hardly knew, who took his life when she was just a toddler.
Actor Lisa Wolpe, the world’s leading female Shakespearean to play traditional male roles, discovered her Jewish roots and found peace and joy in the process of learning about her relatives. (Photo courtesy Lisa Wolpe)
Such a painful loss would be enough to bring most youngsters to the brink of despair as they matured, but Wolpe had the almost unfathomable hardship of going through the entire ordeal again a decade later when she was barely a teenager. This time her mother, stricken with multiple sclerosis, also committed suicide and Wolpe was taken in by her septuagenarian grandmother, who raised her under the Catholic faith.
The subject of suicide was never really addressed in her family due to the stigma attached to it. “People don’t want to talk about it because it causes too much grief,” Wolpe said in a phone interview with the CCJN. “They don’t want to go into the shadowland.”
Wolpe immersed herself in her studies and fancied journalism when she began attending the University of California at San Diego. But she discovered the discipline of theatre during her freshman year and began to gravitate towards it. “I found the world of journalism was very cold and heavily censored by multi-national interests,” she mused. “In theatre you can really free your mind and speak from your soul.”
She found a love for Shakespeare grounded her and she took so many theatre courses that when she graduated, it was with a double major in journalism and theatre. Wolpe enrolled at Goddard College in Vermont as a graduate student, seeking a master’s of fine arts degree in interdisciplinary arts.
Lisa Wolpe as Shylock holding a knife. (Courtesy of Lisa Wolpe)
While she was preparing to write a thesis on Shakespeare for her MFA, she produced an all-female cast of “The Merchant of Venice” with a company she had founded some 15 years previously. She used that opportunity to investigate the spread of anti-Semitism while she played the titular role of Shylock.
With Shylock as an example of a victim of anti-Semitism, Wolpe delved into the themes of intolerance and discrimination and with the backdrop of her parents’ suicides investigated the motivation behind those Shakespearean characters who literally fall on their own swords or ponder suicide such as Hamlet in his famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy.
She knew that her father was Jewish and had heard the horrific story that everyone in her father’s family in Belgium had been killed in the Holocaust. She was able to trace her family’s influence and determined that many of her predecessors had been famous rabbis during the time when Shakespeare penned his works and others – Marrano Jews – had been very involved as experts on music.
“I found all of my family members had numbers tattooed on their arms and had been transported in cattle cars. Their houses were stolen,” Wolpe recalled, giving thanks that she had somehow brought them back to life through her research. “I feel they are looking down from wherever. They are rooting for me, telling me to tell them (the living) who they were. “
“‘Tell them who our names were,'” she imagined them saying to her through the veil of time.
A photo of Lisa Wolpe’s father when he served in the Royal Winipeg Rifles of the Canadian Army (Photo courtesy of Lisa Wolpe)
The work she continued to do in researching her family led her to discover that her father had relatives living in the United States.
As a Christmas present to her brother and sister several years ago, Wolpe purchased a family tree, which was posted online. Within a few days of that posting, she was contacted by a man over the telephone who wondered aloud if she was their long lost cousin. It turned out to be Rabbi Gerald “Jerry” Wolpe, a noted Philadelphia area rabbi of blessed memory and the father of Rabbi David Wolpe, the spiritual leader of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles and considered one of the most influential rabbis in the nation.
She learned from her elder cousin, whom she called “Uncle Jerry,” a number of new facts. Over the course of a weekend, she interviewed him and recorded it on video. “I sat with him for a weekend and videotaped him answering every question I could ask him about my dad,” she explained.
According to the rabbi, they had met her father by chance at Harvard after World War II. They had become close, especially after establishing a familial bond. The rabbi related stories that he had heard first-hand from her father, including the fact he was a bona fide war hero. She learned in her amazement that her father had been responsible for capturing or killing large numbers of Nazis during World War II, while a member of the Royal Winnipeg Rifles infantry unit of the Canadian army.
The unit was famous for landing in Great Britain in 1940 following the beginning of hostilities in September of 1939.
She further gleaned from him that, despite a plethora of hardships, her father had achieved great academic ranking, earning a Ph.D. at Harvard and becoming a professor at Stanford after receiving his doctorate. Wolpe’s mother was one of his undergraduate students. They soon married, but despite the chemistry, the pressures came to bear that her father found inescapable. His inner demons came to play when Wolpe was only two years old.
Following up with her connection to the Jewish Wolpes, she was introduced to her other famous rabbi cousin David. They have had several opportunities in the intervening years to bond over shared meals and develop a genuine friendship. Early on, though, when Rabbi David Wolpe heard that she had been portraying male Shakespeare characters as a female, he invited her to perform solo at Sinai Temple.
The cathartic release she felt in playing her characters and the research that was yielded helped to give her a better understanding of her father’s emotional outlook. “I continue to find new connections and understanding, meeting people who actually knew my dad,” she continued.
She now considers her performances to be a celebration of his life, as she explores the motivations of the Shakespearean characters and their response to outside stimuli such as discrimination and intolerance. She calls it her great life lesson.
“So many of these important subjects are taboo,” she explains. Paramount among them, she says are isolation, loneliness and despair.
“There is a lack of tolerance for differences in the human flower bouquet, she continues. “They find themselves isolated and alone and cannot find a place in the world – and then they commit suicide. People have to stop hating on each other. People can begin to understand instead of lashing out in fear and ignorance.”
All of this gender bending is part of a nationwide trend. Wolpe points to Glenda Jackson’s portrayal as King Lear and an all-female production of “The Taming of the Shrew” in New York this summer as just two examples that she is on the cutting edge.
Wolpe performs “Shakespeare: The Alchemy of Gender,” as part of the New Orleans Shakespeare Festival at Tulane University. The original two-hour long work she has been distilled down to 55 minutes and will be presented at Tulane University’s Dixon Hall Annex on Friday, May 20 through Sunday, May 22. Wolpe will give a talkback following each performance. Tickets are available by calling the New Orleans Shakespeare Festival at Tulane at 504-865-5106.
