“Howl, Howl, Howl…”

Tina’s hand was on my belly, shooting love and light into any holding patterns that I had attempted to install there as my personal, self-preserving semblance of control. It was 1979, and I was 20 years old, at the beginning of my path as a young actress. But the thoughts and feelings of King Lear were suddenly mine to infuse with a world of personal meaning and resonance. I exploded into words and inhabited the role.

Tina Packer’s young and revolutionary Shakespeare & Company artists were holding their second month-long intensive training for actors, and I was immersed in the work. I would spend the next 20 years training with and eventually teaching alongside Tina before I ventured out to start my own all-female multicultural theatre company, the Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company, which I modeled on Tina’s brand of rigor, research, collaborative direction, and poetic excellence, tailoring it to my own specific agenda for exploring cross-gender work and adding a myriad of possibilities provided through intentional, multiracial casting.

When Tina died last week, those words came back to me immediately, curling out of my guts, sighing out of bones. She put the “how” into emitting a “howl.” In the devastating grief of losing a person I loved so completely, the vowels will carry the emotion, the consonants will carry the intellect. “H” is a laughing sound. If you can laugh, you can cry, and the audience will breathe with you.

She was, like Cleopatra, a kind of empress. Her world was one of words and vibrations, breath and power; she was one of a kind, “a lass unparallel’d.” Fifty years after my first lesson with her, these powerful, personal experiences of testing my growth as an actor, of telling my personal truth through Shakespeare’s text to Tina, with Tina, were always my most potent moments of personal calibration and cartography. She celebrated and knew how to galvanize our efforts toward clarity, breakthroughs of insight, courage and eloquence, reframing memory and imagination, transforming the way an actors’ work could be seen and heard. We speak our truth in community, as best we can. Reverberations follow.

Tina was a warrior intent on gaining ground for humanity. Her wit and will were dedicated to transforming us all into a legion of skilled uplifters who could dance and sing and play Shakespeare beautifully. Brilliant, funny, curious in the extreme, a champion of risk takers, outrageous, clever, incredibly hard-working, she dared us all to follow our passions. She gathered wisdom and held court with curiosity and a markedly mischievous laugh. She created an amazing artistic home for a constant river of sparkling souls, young and old. She traveled the world raising up words, causes, people, plans and plots and always: big ideas.

Tina taught us to lift our voices up and ask big questions, shake our spears of wisdom at the limited mind maps we navigated, and thrill to the release of human thought and feeling. Her company was made up of people from all over the world: clowns, sages, dancers, philosophers, fighters, fools, scholars, players, teachers, writers, filmmakers, movers and shakers, thinkers and feelers, leaders and seekers, young and old. The depth of the actor training she envisioned, and her clearly stated purpose to leave the world a more interesting and enlivened place through the genius of Shakespeare, meant that each of us were to solemnly meditate on the purpose of our lives in art—and then do something with it, amazing and beautiful and new. A vast community of artists flocked along beside her, watching and witnessing one another, jaws dropped, hearts open, ready for a collective complex humanity to emerge and serve, ready to distill the work, to attempt to render excellence.

Tina twinkled, she cackled, she roared, she glowed. She listened more deeply, derived more nuance, responded with a fuller, more embodied affirmation of life and choice and destiny and possibility than any other person I have ever met. I adored her completely and without reservation. For thousands of us she was a light, a joy, a legend, a friend. She changed us, and we became better artists and more enlightened humans because of her stunning capacity to expand with us into larger versions of ourselves. 

For myself, she took me from “good student” to “world-class artist,” met me all over the world on stages large and small, always supported my vision and my evolution, was always ready to help, never made me feel like anything but a good kid on a brave path. She gave me all the validation any theatre mother could possibly generate. Nobody was or will ever be more inspiring, more delightful, or more brave in leading me to community than Tina. I never had a better friend or a more wonderful teacher. She was a fierce and passionate force for good, a great actress, director, teacher, producer, and iconoclast. She blew open all of our minds with a hearty laugh, a warm embrace, and a brilliant raft of commentary. She recognized and helped us invent our possibilities, delighting in the wild and wonderful world around her.

I will always keep Tina Packer in my “heart of hearts,” as Hamlet said, and I am proud to be a little part of her huge and fabulous flock. My life has been forever blessed by her breadth, her kindness, her vision, and her infectious appetite for life and work. Her memory is, without question, a great and precious blessing.

She took up the fabric of my life and helped me to see beautiful patterns: to speak the truth, to go deeper, to be courageous, to send out hope, to raise the standards, to think big, to love bigger! I stand humbly in adoration of everything she stood for. I loved her completely. She made our lives sing with joy. She was the greatest teacher that I have ever met.

Lisa Wolpe is an actor, director, and visionary who has been leading the movement for gender parity and diversity in the arts, whose solo show Shakespeare and the Alchemy of Gender has toured the world.