“I don’t choose easy plays!” exclaims Rosa Joshi. She’s explaining her selection of "Richard II" as the vehicle for her directorial debut with Seattle Shakespeare Company.
“There are no small choices in Shakespeare. He makes you go to the extremities of emotion and experience, from the heights of joy to the depths of despair. That to me is infinitely challenging,” says Joshi, who has been on the fine arts faculty at Seattle University since 2000.
Extreme situations frame “Richard II,” which traces the downfall of its titular king. Ill-suited to the throne, the impolitic Richard is forced to hand the crown over to his cousin-made-rival, Henry Bolingbroke, before being imprisoned and assassinated. His dramatic reversal of fortune has its counterpart in Henry’s equally dramatic ascent.
Over the past decade, Joshi has made a splash in Seattle with her all-women versions of Shakespeare. In 2006 she co-founded upstart crow, a local collective devoted to producing classic theater with exclusively female casts. Their inaugural production took on the Bard’s “King John”; their second effort followed in 2012 with the ultra-violent “Titus Andronicus.”
“Any time you have one gender onstage it makes you look at gender differently," Joshi says. "I’m not so much prescriptive about what it means, but think of it as an experiment in how the audience relates to the work. For some people, the gender simply goes away, and some people really notice it.”
