The Jewish Community of Sedona and the Verde Valley will be sponsoring two free performances of Lisa Wolpe’s one-woman show “Shakespeare and the Alchemy of Gender,” at the Mary D. Fisher Theatre on Saturday, Nov. 23, at 7 p.m., and Sunday, Nov. 24, at 1 p.m. 

The show combines monologues from William Shakespeare’s male characters with stories from Wolpe’s family history to create a 55-minute show that playwright and performer Wolpe described as a “depth charge” intended to personalize the playwright’s work. Each show is followed by a Q&A with the audience. 

“This story and her life touches on so many different subjects, and it’s empowering, it’s life-affirming, it’s moving. Everything you want and anticipate to experience in great theatre is in this show and you will walk away absolutely blown away,” Sedona International Film Festival Director Patrick Schweiss said. 

Wolpe said that “Shakespeare and the Alchemy of Gender” is dedicated to her father, Hans Max Joachim Wolpe [June, 17 1918— May 1, 1963], a German Jew who resisted the Nazis during World War II and committed suicide when Wolpe was 4. She said his legacy to her was courage. He escaped a Nazi slave labor battalion around Calais in September 1944 to fight with the Royal Winnipeg Rifles until he was wounded in spring 1945. 

“The men who fought with him in the Canadian regiment said that he was the bravest man they ever met,” Wolpe said. “And he was very much forgotten, ignored and shunned for reasons … having to do with my mother, who was Christian. And there was a lot of intolerance around that blended family choice, but also just, I think, PTSD from the brutal, horrible life that was unfolded by the Nazis upon my Jewish family, all of whom were murdered at Auschwitz, except my dad.” 

Wolpe said her performance is intended to explore gender dynamics as a means of taking back control in the face of a personal tragedy. 

“It’s a series of very Hamletian questions about being an intelligent person in a flawed world, and examining legacy as I interrogate my father’s legacy,” Wolpe said. “I’m really creating my own as a woman who’s played more of the male roles in Shakespeare than any woman in history, as far as I know.” 

Wolpe said she finds it powerful and political to step into the center of the narrative as a female artist and that she is as dedicated to capturing Hamlet’s complexity or the intensity of Macbeth’s brutality as any male actor. 

“As I stand in the male role, it helps me take up all the space around myself,” Wolpe said. “It gives me no obstacle to believing that I … have manifest destiny to carve out my passage on the planet and protect my ideas and build my reputation. Very different from playing a female character, where you’re usually in some kind of a victim role, where you have to be murdered off stage … to be integral of the man’s action story.” 

She said she feels the show’s message of peace to be especially timely in the current political climate. 

“There’s a lot of communication that erupts from the risks that I take on stage, even as I know it’s crazy and risky and it’s scary for me each time to conjure my ancestors and open my heart,” Wolpe said “But doing this show has really made me feel happy about his legacy and that he’s seen in a positive light, and I feel close to him, and I’ve done the work.”

 “This performance of ‘Shakespeare and the Alchemy of Gender’ is the perfect kick-off to our upcoming partnership with actors from the Utah Shakespeare Festival,” Schweiss said. “That is where I first discovered the incredibly talented Lisa Wolpe, and I have been wanting to bring her here to Sedona with her one-person, very personal show. It seems appropriate that this phenomenal production be the first in what I hope will be a long and mutually-beneficial relationship.” 

Tickets can be ordered online at SedonaFilmFestival.org and questions may be directed to (928) 282-1177.