Every night is ladies' night at Shakespeare Dallas

Дата публикации: 13-06-2026 08:59:00

This summer, women are calling the shots at Shakespeare Dallas.
Both shows of the summer season, William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor and Alice in Wonderland, based on the Lewis Carroll classic, focus on women, their curiosity, their wit and their journey of self-discovery.
In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff thinks he can solve his financial woes by seducing two women, Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, but these ladies know better and turn the tables on Falstaff. Alice in Wonderland features young Alice falling down a rabbit hole and into the topsy turvy world of the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, and the Queen of Hearts.This bizarre world becomes Alice’s place of self-discovery.
The Merry Wives of Windsor runs June 12 – July 19 and Alice in Wonderland runs June 19 – July 17 at the Samuell-Grand Amphitheater in Dallas.
For the first time, both shows of the summer season are directed by women. Jenni Stewart, the Executive and Artistic Director of Shakespeare Dallas, directs The Merry Wives of Windsor. Natalie Young is making her directorial debut with Alice in Wonderland. Stewart and Young talk about the joy of directing, what the women in their respective shows have in common and what the shows say about womanhood.
NBC DFW: You both have done a lot of different things in theater. What do you love about directing?
Jenni Stewart (JS):  What I love about directing is that it’s the art form of building community. You get to gather a group of wildly different people around a shared act of imagination and ask, “What are we trying to say together?” I love the collaboration of it. I love watching actors surprise themselves. And honestly, I love helping audiences see themselves reflected in stories that are hundreds of years old. Shakespeare can feel intimidating until suddenly it feels deeply personal and human, and getting to help unlock that for people is one of my favorite things in the world.
Natalie Young (NY): Directing is such a joy because you get to collaborate with every touchpoint that creates the world of the play from its inception. As an actor, your experience is primarily contained to the physical reality of the piece — your role, your scene partner, the moment you’re inside. But as a director, you get to dream with designers – composers, puppet makers, drapers, and so many other humans who add their individuality to the piece. You get to watch the entire thing expand and unfold before your eyes.
And then, of course, the play closes. That’s part of what makes theatre so beautiful to me. It reminds me of those sand mandalas monks create and then destroy. A whole world is built with this massive team of people, and it requires so much from each of them, until one day we close and the whole thing disappears, except for what lives in our memory and the memory of the audience who experienced it. We all give so much of ourselves in hopes it makes someone laugh or smile or cry or remember themselves for a brief moment, and then we say thank you, pack it up, and move on to the next one. There’s something deeply human and joyful to me about that cycle. It makes what we do so special.
Alice in Wonderland marks Natalie Young’s directorial debut.
NBC DFW: What do Alice and the women in The Merry Wives of Windsor have in common?
JS:  I think Alice and the women of The Merry Wives of Windsor are all navigating worlds that underestimate them. They’re surrounded by rules, expectations, absurd authority figures, and people trying to define who they should be. But both stories are ultimately about women and girls reclaiming agency through imagination, wit, playfulness, and community. They refuse to stay trapped in the roles other people assign to them.
NY: The Wives and Alice are quite smart and up for a good game – if only everyone around them would simply behave.
NBC DFW: Jenni, what makes Mistress Ford and Mistress Page different from Shakespeare’s other female characters?
JS: What’s so special about Mistress Ford and Mistress Page is that Shakespeare lets them be fully funny, clever, strategic, and deeply in control of the action. So many of Shakespeare’s women are isolated or trapped by the men around them, but these women are collaborators. They delight in each other. They are middle-class wives and mothers, not queens or tragic heroines, and Shakespeare treats their intelligence and domestic lives as worthy of comedy and power. They completely outsmart Falstaff and frankly most of the men in the play. The women run this town.
Shakespeare’s famous fool, Falstaff, tries to trick two women. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t work.
NBC DFW: Natalie, what does Alice discover about herself in this production?
NY: In a way, Alice represents all of us, because we experience the play through her eyes. 
Since the whole thing takes place inside of a dream, Alice (and the audience) get dropped into this completely nonsensical world where none of the rules from her waking life seem to apply. No one behaves the way she expects them to, and every attempt to create order only seems to create more chaos.
When Alice achieves her hope of becoming a queen, instead of feeling empowered by it, she’s suddenly burdened by expectation. Much like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, she simply wants to go home, or in this case: wake up. 
What I think the play ultimately suggests is that so many of the “rules” we live by are simply someone else’s invention. Of course, structure is necessary, but we see Alice discover that she simply cannot live a life of obedience without inquiry. While this “wonderland” may be quite fantastic, it’s also frustrating and exhausting for Alice.
So, in that sense, once she learns to trust her instincts and not be confined by conventions of others, Wonderland becomes a reminder of the limitless possibilities that always surround us even, and most especially, in the most ordinary parts of our life – perhaps when we’re playing a board game at home with our cat.
Alice in Wonderland features all of the beloved characters from Lewis Carroll’s classic novel.
NBC DFW: What do these classic stories tell modern audiences about womanhood/girlhood?
JS: I think both stories remind modern audiences that girlhood and womanhood are not passive states. They are active, messy, imaginative, rebellious, joyful experiences. These plays show women building alliances, testing identities, questioning authority, and trying to create lives larger than the boxes society gives them. And importantly, they do it with humor. There’s something deeply powerful about women surviving and transforming the world through wit, play, and resilience.
NY: For me, both of these shows suggest that what we’ve traditionally defined as feminine doesn’t always have to be soft, passive, or easily palatable. Few of the characters in Wonderland, including Alice, approach womanhood with delicacy. I think what ties Alice to Mistress Ford and Mistress Page is they all navigate the most absurd of circumstances with an attitude of curiosity, playfulness, and a deep sense of self-possession. They assert themselves when needed, but their strength doesn’t resemble the traditionally masculine version we’re used to seeing- commanding armies or dominating a room. Instead, their power comes from intelligence, intuition, wit, and perhaps most of all: a sort of quiet certainty that they understood what was really happening long before everyone else did. They simply never felt the need to boast about it. 
Learn more: Shakespeare Dallas

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