Seattle Theatre Stages All-Female 'Coriolanus: Fight Like a Bitch'

The country is at war, and the Senate can't keep the peace, even within its own walls. Enter Coriolanus, the country's most badass warrior. She's returned home to win the love of the people and run for office -- or face the dangerous consequences of defying society's expectations. It's William Shakespeare's rarely-staged drama about politics, power, and pride, replete with daring physical combat and deliciously vicious language, and it's staged by an all-female cast featuring Nike Imoru in the title role, at Seattle's 12th Ave. Arts.

"To live like a legend... sometimes you have to fight like a bitch," is the tagline of director Emily Penick's rollicking new production.

"I was fascinated when I came onto this project to find that this production of 'Coriolanus' is not just all-female, but it's women who are actually playing women, which is very unusual," said Penick.

In the play, Coriolanus is a wife, a daughter, a mother, and a career soldier. She and her female partner are raising a young daughter in tumultuous times, and neither of them behave in the way the political arena expects them to.

The character was originally played as a man who was the greatest warrior ever known, but who had no idea of how to behave in a political arena. In this staging, Coriolanus keeps the attitude.

Said Penick, "I love the idea of an honest, blunt woman with a very low tolerance for bullshit."

"Funny, but that sounds an awful lot like me!" exclaims lead actor Nike Imoru. "I recognize as a black woman navigating the globe, the constant negotiations that happen as a woman working in all male and predominantly white spaces. It's that fine line between bullshit and having to be a skilled diplomat. I wonder if it's a skill borne out of the challenges of living astride both cultures."

Imoru, who admitted she's been wanting to perform this, her favorite Shakespeare role, since her 20s, noted that the exquisite language drew her in.

Although Imoru is one of several women of color cast in this staging, lead producer Colleen Carey said that she doesn't really believe in color-blind or gender-blind casting. Her conception of Shakespeare has traditionally been very diverse, with characters inhabited by all races and genders.

"I came at this play from a modern perspective," said Carey. "Who said female characters have to be sensitive? Coriolanus is neither a hero or an anti-hero, so it made sense to fill the production with women or female-identified performers, and also people of color, because those voices are most familiar to me. Casting took twice as long, because I intentionally cast women of color in leading and supporting roles, but from top to bottom, I am aware of the optics of every single scene, and what it is we will be saying."

This includes Wendy Robie, who plays Coriolanus' mother, Volumnia. She plays the character as a strong woman, one who has "raised a hero and a warrior, my pride is in her pride, my valor is in hers, it's my entire identity."

"The world in our play is all women, and Coriolanus is the She-Wolf of Rome," said Robie. "But she is my wonderful daughter, and the role of gender doesn't even enter into that universe. I wonder, 'Did I have a wife?' I imagine that I was a soldier, who made the sacrifice in order to become mother to another soldier. Talk about your stage mothers! Every victory, every wound of Coriolanus, I feel on my flesh, that's how powerful it is. But I'm smothering her, too. I'm one hell of a mom."

Penick said she was excited to explore the mother/daughter dynamic, and the concept that there are three generations of women on stage at the same time: Volumnia teaching Coriolanus, watched closely from the sidelines by her 14-year-old daughter, who wants to grow up to be just like mom.

"In our production, the mother is egging on her very powerful warrior daughter, so we get this amazing, disturbing look at the relationship between mothers and daughters at every stage of their lives," said Penick.

Fight Like a Bitch

"Coriolanus" is one of Shakespeare's most physically demanding productions, but the team at Seattle's 12th Ave. Arts is prepared for the challenge. And stage violence can go just as far as a good storyline in revealing relationships between characters. As the director and choreographer, Penick wanted to be sure that this was done well.

"I felt it was really important for this production that we not just give lip service that this a stage full of women, and then go and hire a male fight choreographer," said Penick. "We felt strongly that it should be choreographed by a woman -- not necessarily me, but... I'm one of the only female fight choreographers in this area of the Pacific Northwest."

Penick kicked off the rehearsal process with a week of movement and fighting workshops, saying that she wanted to guide the actors, dancers, and fighters to achieve movements that were more dance-oriented, generated and shaped by female bodies.

Lead producer Carey said that the actors were ready to visually change the preconceived notions of feminine movement, to make it much more visceral and even grotesque. Suffering, pain, and anguish are all within the scope of what it means to be human, and woman, she noted.

"Violence is not inherently male, and I'm very excited to see this female version of classically-gendered feelings of warfare," echoed Penick.

"Just look at the Bacchae, and you can see that the Greeks knew that," chimed Imoru. Training as a classical actor in England, she learned this physicality from the very beginning, using it recently during a dance theatre piece she devised with two others.

"As a classical actor, I am already a stage animal, so I am very available to do physical work," said Imoru. "I don't really separate between the soliloquies and the fight scenes, all are physically embodied when I'm on stage. Whatever Emily throws at me will be thrilling, because I love this stuff! This physicality courses through my veins, part training and part passion."

But as with many plays about war, "Coriolanus" delivers a clear message about the costs of war, and the lack of romance in a cityscape under siege, whose people are desperately fighting for their lives.

"I'm working on bringing to the stage just how prismatic and complex this is, just how high the stakes are," said Imoru. "I want to bring the sense of how endlessly complex and problematic it is to juggle all those thoughts and feelings, how the body itself becomes written with complexity and schisms."

For Penick, the goal is not only to bring to the stage an exceptional, world-class Shakespeare production but to change the idea that women -- particularly women of color -- can't or don't do Shakespeare.

"It was important to me to put women in every leading role, to see folks realize that women can be pissing all over Shakespeare and doing a great job, owning and marching through this territory," said Penick. "We are exposing the myth that an all-female Shakespeare production can't be successful."

Noting the 50-year age span between the oldest and youngest cast members, Carey also wants to highlight the myth that women can only be powerful when they are young and beautiful.

"That's why the tagline reads 'To live like a legend, you have to fight like a bitch,' because any way that a woman fights, they will call her a bitch," said Carey. "But I really think Coriolanus can be seen as a legend, even though people see the character as either a beast or a god. And when people leave the theatre, I want them to think not only about how many women of color we have in the stage and crew, but to reflect later on the idea about the liminal space between whether a hero or antihero is a beast or a god, and whether a person has to be likeable to be deified, or if they'll be banished as a beast."

"We are breaking gender expectations in casting Shakespeare in a way that I hope opens people's hearts and minds, which I've found to be true in other Shakespeare productions with unexpected gender casting," said Penick. "I think it's better this way."