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Woman’s Will, the Oakland-based all-female Shakespeare company, celebrates their eighth season of free performances of Shakespeare In The Park with performances of Richard III this Saturday and Sunday at 1 p.m. in John Hinkel Park. 

Next weekend the group will perform at Oakland’s Mosswood Park (Saturday) and Dimond Park (Sunday). They will appear at other local venues till Aug. 14. Directed by Susannah Martin, the performance features Emily Jordan as Richard (Duke of Gloucester, later King). 

The Woman’s Will production focuses on “how the tradition of fighting and killing is passed down from generation to generation, children learning it at their parents’ side,” according to Artistic Director Erin Merritt. “Susannah saw that, in the play, the adults keep acting like children. She had the actors find the most childish moments of their characters, where the masks of adulthood start to slip.” 

Otherwise, she said, it’s a traditional performance, with emphasis on the text and the acting. 

“It’s an all-female cast,” Merritt said, “but nothing particularly conceptual in interpretation. The women still lose. But it’s the women and children in the play who first get that something dangerous is going on.”  

Shakespeare’s character study of this ruthless social climber, beginning with his famous speech “Now is the winter of our discontent” and ending with “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” at the Battle of Bosworth which closed the War of the Roses, also presents some of the most cynical relations between the sexes onstage. 

“Elissa Dunn as Lady Anne is able to make the audience believe that she can make the change from abhorring Richard, who’s responsible for her husband’s death, to thinking that maybe she’ll just marry him!” Merritt said. “And Emily is so charming ... what’s usually seen as such an abrupt shift makes sense on stage.” 

Founded in 1998 as a Shakespeare repertory company, Woman’s Will does more than titles by the Bard. In past years, they’ve performed Lord of the Flies, The Importance of Being Earnest and The Rover, a Restoration comedy by Aphra Behn (the first professional woman playwright), each with an all-female cast. This fall they will present the Bertolt Brecht-Kurt Weill musical, Happy End, at Luka’s Taproom in Oakland.  

But the Bard, and all-women productions in the parks, are their raison d’etre. 

“We were actors well trained in Shakespeare and in stage combat who were not able to use our skills,” Merritt said. “We’d all go to the huge number of auditions for Shakespeare festivals up and down the coast, each hiring about 30 men and three women—and there’d be 30 men and about 50 women sitting there, waiting to audition. The odds were terrible.” 

Merritt said that the women decided to make to odds more favorable. 

“I’d talk to other women about what a waste of talent this was—and how we were missing out on all that on-the-job training,” she said. “We needed a women’s company. And everybody said, ‘You gotta do it, you gotta do it!’—they were so into it, I figured that, sooner or later, somebody would start one. So we tried it once, just for fun—Two Gentlemen of Verona, subtitled “There Are No Gentlemen In Verona”—and everybody in the audience asked, ‘When’s the next one?’ They really wanted to see it done this way, and we hadn’t realized how much.” 

Woman’s Will presents Richard III at 1 p.m. July 16 and 17 at Berkeley’s John Hinkel Park; at 1 p.m. July 23 at Mosswood Park, Oakland, and at 6 p.m. at Rossmoor’s Dollar Clubhouse Lawn, Walnut Creek; at 1 p.m. July 24, at Diamond Park, Oakland. For other venues in July and August call 420-0813 or see www.womanswill.org.  

All shows are free.›