Tina Packer

Christina Packer (born 28 September 1938) is a British stage director and actress based in the United States. Educated at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, she originally worked as an actress, starring in the BBC television serial David Copperfield. After she quit acting and became a stage director in the United States, she founded the Shakespearean theatre company Shakespeare & Company, serving as its artistic director from its second foundation in 1978 until 2009.

Tina Packer
Born	(1938-09-28) 28 September 1938 (age 86) Wolverhampton, Staffordshire, England
Alma mater	Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts
Occupation	Stage director
Spouses	Laurie Asprey ​ (div. 1980)​ Dennis Krausnick ​ ​ (m. 1998; died 2018)​
Children	1
Awards	Guggenheim Fellowship (1994)

Biography

Christina Packer was born on 28 September 1938 in Wolverhampton.^[1] She was raised in Nottingham and educated at a Quaker school,^[1] as well as West Bridgford Grammar School.^[2] She later spent two years in France with an older man she had a relationship with, before they broke off.^[3][4]

Originally working at a magazine editorial office, she decided to go into acting because "I suppose I'm a natural born exhibitionist."^[2] Returning to the United Kingdom, she was educated at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, graduating in 1964 with the Ronson Award for Most Promising Actress.^[3] She then worked at the Royal Shakespeare Company, which she had visited while as a youth, as an associate artist.^[5] Despite her contract lasting three years, she left early to star in David Copperfield,^[4] where she starred as Dora Spenlow.^[6] She also appeared in Doctor Who,^[3] as well as in the 1967 movie Two a Penny.^[7] However, she felt that she lacked a voice as a performer, and after her scenes in an adaptation of Washington Square were cut from the final broadcast, she quit acting.^[3] In 1971, she began work in the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, where she was a stage director and teacher,^[8] before she moved to the United States to direct Shakespeare plays.^[9]

She started Shakespeare & Company, an experimental Shakespearean theatre company funded by the CBS Foundation and Ford Foundation in 1974;^[10] she named the company after a bookstore of the same name she often visited during her time in Paris.^[4] After a poor reception in the United States and depletion of funding, she took a brief hiatus from stage direction.^[10] In 1978, she directed Les Femmes Savantes at the Kennedy Center and then restarted Shakespeare & Company at The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts, wanting a traditional Shakespearean theatre.^[10][8] She was the founding artistic director of Shakespeare & Company, holding the position until stepping down in 2009.^[11]

Her first directed performance for the company had to be done outdoors because the mansion had not been restored yet.^[10][8] Despite initial reception being mostly lackluster, it was praised in The Village Voice and became well-known in New York City.^[10][8] As a stage director, she has also used color-blind casting in Shakespearean plays, allowing Black and Asian actors to appear in traditionally White roles.^[12][13] In 1985, a book from Helen Epstein on Packer and the company, Tina Packer Builds A Theater was published,^[8] and WGBH-TV aired a documentary centered around her, Sex, Violence and Poetry.^[14] In 2008, Anne Fliotsos and Wendy Vierow called her "one of the foremost directors of Shakespeare in the United States".^[1] She won the 2019 Shakespeare Theatre Association Lifetime Achievement Award.^[15]

In 1991, she directed a version of Hamlet at North Shore Music Theatre, set in West Africa and performed by a predominantly-Black American cast.^[16] In 1993, she directed Boston Center for the Arts productions of John L. Balderston's Berkeley Square and Tom Kempinski's Duet for One, as well as a Canadian Stage Company production of Marisha Chamberlain's Scheherazade.^[16] She was also artistic director of the Boston Shakespeare Company.^[3] She has also directed several adaptations of the works of Edith Wharton, who had lived in The Mount herself.^[16] She has also done acting in addition to directing, calling directing "such a sedentary occupation".^[16]

She has also worked as a Shakespeare teacher in higher education, including at the Columbia University MBA programme.^[8] In 1994, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.^[17] She also published Power Plays: Shakespeare's Lessons in Leadership and Management (2001),^[8] Tales from Shakespeare (2004), literary criticism book Women of Will (2016), and Shakespeare & Company: When Action Is Eloquence (2020).^[18]

She was married to actor Laurie Asprey, with whom she had a son, Shakespeare & Company actor Jason Asprey.^[19] The couple separated around the time she quit acting, but did not formally divorce until the early-1980s.^[3][19] In 1998, she married Dennis Krausnick, a stage acting educator and Shakespeare & Company co-founder; they remained married until his death in 2018.^[20][21]

A resident of Woodthorpe, Nottinghamshire, in 1964,^[2] Packer lives in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.^[22]