Tina Packer, an ardent and prolific interpreter of Shakespeare who left Britain in the 1970s to start a repertory theater in his name in the woods of western Massachusetts and ended up directing all three dozen or so of his plays, died on Jan. 9 in Pittsfield, Mass. She was 87.
Her death, in a hospital, was caused by organ failure, said her son, Martin Asprey, an actor who worked with her.
In 1978, Ms. Packer founded Shakespeare & Company with Kristin Linklater, a voice teacher; Dennis Krausnick, an actor, director and writer who later became Ms. Packer’s husband; and a group of other theater artists.
By training an actress, Ms. Packer served as the company’s artistic director until 2009, as it presented a mix of Shakespeare’s works and other plays — classical, modern and new — first at the Mount, Edith Wharton’s estate in Lenox, Mass., and, since 2001, at a nearby complex of five theaters, including one that was named for Ms. Packer in 2012.
She helped oversee the growth of the company from a small outdoor troupe to a major regional theater with an annual revenue of nearly $4.9 million.
“I wanted to set up a company that could be like Shakespeare’s company,” she told The New York Times in 2017, adding: “Shakespeare is so full of insight and so full of glorious poetry that we were inspired by him.”
The eminent Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt described Ms. Packer in an email as a “force of nature and a brilliant, passionate Shakespearean.”
When she visited his undergraduate course in Shakespearean playwriting in 2005, he added, she “electrified us all by suddenly becoming Paulina in ‘The Winter’s Tale’ and declaring fiercely, ‘It is a heretic that makes the fire, not she which burns in it.’ The play, the character, the moment all came vividly to life. I’ll never forget it.”
Shakespeare & Company emphasized training actors in stage combat, movement, voice, and close examination of the text, as much as it did performance. Ms. Packer was influenced by her study with John Barton, a pre-eminent director who helped start the Royal Shakespeare Company, as well as exercises she learned through the self-improvement program EST (Erhard Seminars Training) in the 1970s.
In 1993, the critic Ben Brantley of The Times praised Ms. Packer’s creation of a “strong, cohesive and sui generis language-based style” in the troupe’s approach to staging “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
Her five-decade directing journey through Shakespeare’s canon — counted by most scholars as 37 plays — began in 1971 when she was teaching at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and staged “Measure for Measure,” “The Winter’s Tale” and “Hamlet.” She ended in 2017, with “Cymbeline.”
Completing the full corpus, she said, was not a specific goal, but she kept on because of Shakespeare’s deepening views on women.
“In the beginning they’re either shrews or sweet young things,” she told The Times, “but by the time he gets to his late plays, he says: ‘Guys, you have to go with what the women say. Otherwise we’re all lost.’ That really made me want to keep going.”
It also inspired her to develop “Women of Will,” a production that she conceived in the 1990s and performed for many years. It combined scene work alongside a male actor with discussions that illuminated Shakespeare’s female characters in some 25 plays.
The critic Lawrence Toppman wrote in The Charlotte Observer in 2011 that Ms. Packer “takes us on a swooping ride” through Shakespeare’s “lady warriors, shrews, romantic spirits, truth-tellers (punished or rewarded, depending on how they get their points across), women trying to be like men and women healing men by trying not to be like them,.”
Ms. Packer adapted the show into a book, “Women of Will: Following the Feminine in Shakespeare’s Plays” (2015), in which “her knowledgeable tracing of connections among the plays and parallels among characters is never less than compelling,” Michiko Kakutani wrote in a Times review.
Christina Roberta Packer was born on Sept. 29, 1938, in Wolverhampton, England, and moved with her family to Nottingham after World War II. She was one of four children of Eddie Packer, a probation officer who later became a writer and the owner of a secondhand bookstore, and Phyllis (Perry) Packer, an English teacher.
In boarding school, she memorized speeches from Shakespeare’s plays and acted. Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace, was nearby, and she and her classmates traveled to see his works performed there.
After high school, she had a two-year romantic fling in France, then returned to England, where she worked as a receptionist and later as a journalist for the weekly magazine Woman.
Bored and wanting to act, she applied to drama schools and was accepted at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. She received the Ronson Award for most promising actress when she graduated in 1964.
She soon joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, then left in 1967 and performed at Stratford-upon-Avon and elsewhere in Britain, as well as on television series including “David Copperfield” (with Ian McKellen) and “Doctor Who.”
After teaching at the London Academy, she received funding from the Ford Foundation that let her travel to the United States and other countries to study theater.
She and her colleagues started Shakespeare & Company at Wharton’s rundown Gilded Age mansion, choosing the location for its proximity to Tanglewood and Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival.
After Ms. Packer stepped down as artistic director in 2009, the company, under financial pressures in the wake of the recession and some $10 million in debt, went through a period of management upheaval, including the abrupt departure of her successor. But its leadership eventually stabilized, and last fall Shakespeare & Company announced that for the first time in its history it was debt-free, after paying off its mortgage.
Allyn Burrows, the company’s artistic director since 2016, praised Ms. Packer as a rules-bending creative force. “If you had a propensity for the outlandish, she encouraged it,” he said. “She wanted to push the limits of what you could do.”
Her work was the subject of the books “Tina Packer Builds a Theater” (1985), by Helen Epstein and “Shakespeare in the Theatre: Tina Packer” (2024), by Katharine Goodland. She also received the lifetime achievement award from the Shakespeare Theatre Association in 2019.
In addition to her son, Ms. Packer is survived by two brothers, Julian and Nicholas Packer. Her marriage to the actor Laurie Asprey ended in divorce. Mr. Krausnick, her second husband, died in 2018.
She continued to teach and direct at Shakespeare & Company, and Mr. Asprey, her son, said that she was preparing to lead a class when she fell ill, the day before she died. He recalled a moment in 2006 when he and Ms. Packer were onstage in “Hamlet” — he in the title role, and she as Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother.
“When I said, ‘You are the queen, your husband’s brother’s wife, and (would it were not so) you are my mother,’ she hit me,” Mr. Asprey said.
The hard slap to his chest surprised him and, when they got backstage, he asked her why she had struck him.
“She looked me dead in the eyes,” Mr. Asprey recalled, “and said, very princely, and with clarity and a touch of anger, ‘You meant it!’ And I said, ‘That’s the idea, right?’ Then we both laughed and got on with the show.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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