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Actor and theater scholar Tamara Meneghini brings the long-ruling monarch to life in a solo performance that earned rave reviews at the recent Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Historical figures are so easily flattened into two dimensions—all stiff pleats and inscrutable expressions rendered in oils.

The challenge for artists and scholars, then, is how to lift these figures from the canvas—to regard them in three dimensions, to allow them foibles and failings and humanity.

For Tamara Meneghini, that meant more than just donning a red wig and pounds of brocade as one of the most famous women in Western history. It meant studying the time in which Elizabeth I of England lived—researching what influenced her behavior in her time period, how she interacted with people, what games she played, how she followed the rules and how she broke them.

Tamara Meneghini, an associate professor in the ��ƷSM����ӰƬ Department of Theatre and Dance, performed to rave reviews as the titular monarch in "Elizabeth I: In Her Own Words" at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

To become Elizabeth I onstage, Meneghini had to understand the monarch as a human woman and bring her to life for modern audiences who may believe there’s nothing new to understand about her.

So, audiences at Scotland’s in August were surprised and then delighted to rediscover the queen they thought they knew. Playing the not-so-popular-in-Scotland monarch in the one-woman performance “Elizabeth I: In Her Own Words,” Meneghini performed before full theaters and to glowing reviews.

“The key to fringe festivals is audiences want you to connect,” explains Meneghini, an associate professor in the ��ƷSM����ӰƬ Department of Theatre and Dance. “You have to connect. The audience can’t be just audience. The way our piece was set up, it worked really nicely that audience felt like A) they were in the presence of the queen and B) they could not leave, they were there with me in the moment, in this meta sort of space. I was interacting with them as the queen, but in a very specific circumstance we had created.”

Becoming Elizabeth

Meneghini’s interest in Elizabeth I grew, in part, from her interest in styles and plays from different time periods—"the ways in which we behave in those time periods, how changes in clothing, dances, culture, protocols can affect behavior,” she explains.

While working at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, where she taught before joining the ��ƷSM����ӰƬ faculty in 2008, Meneghini developed a concert of early Renaissance music that involved era-specific instruments such as sackbuts and crumhorns. However, she also wanted to bring in elements of theater and approached , a pre-eminent scholar of Elizabeth I and women in the Renaissance era.

“Carole was pivotal because what we created was a fictitious meeting between Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots,” Meneghini says. “Part of that was crafting this improvisation with students that was really cool. It ended up being a combination of theater and film and history, and it was just a blast.”

Fast forward to 2016, when ��ƷSM����ӰƬ was honored as a stop for the first-ever national touring exhibition of Shakespeare’s First Folio.

Tamara Meneghini as Elizabeth I outside Edinburgh's Craigmillar Castle (left) and onstage (right) as the long-ruling monarch.

“When the Folio came through, I was doing a period styles class, and I was asked to create something for the Folio visit,” she says. “I immediately thought of Elizabeth I—the idea of Elizabeth, the time period, Shakespeare’s plays. I know they never met, but she certainly influenced his plays, so I started working on this thing based on Carole’s series of lectures that she did about Elizabeth.”

The initial performance was a duet, with Meneghini playing Elizabeth in front of projected images from the time period to which Levin had access. Meneghini and her acting partner—Bernadette Sefic, a ��ƷSM����ӰƬ BFA/acting graduate and recent MFA graduate of the Old Globe and University of San Diego Shiley Graduate Theatre Program—performed at universities and sometimes in community theaters, and in costumes designed by theater colleague Markas Henry.

“As the costume as story went on, Elizabeth is becoming more and more like a real person,” Meneghini says. “The portraiture that we have of her was largely staged by how her council and her parliament wanted her to look. We wanted this piece to be an opportunity to see Elizabeth as the woman, as the human, as someone audiences could relate to.

“Markas and I talked a lot about this costume coming apart, and he made this thing that’s close to 30 pounds—the costume is immense—that gradually sheds layers through the performance.”

Fringe opportunities

Two years ago, ��ƷSM����ӰƬ graduate Penny Cole, founder of , approached Meneghini about creating a solo show and put her in contact with a Scottish theater scholar who asked whether she’d be interested in performing at Edinburgh Fringe.

Meneghini sought Levin’s expertise, as well as that of Denver-based theater guru Sabin Epstein, to craft a solo play from what began as lectures. The 55-minute play, for which Levin is credited as writer, is based on Elizabeth’s own writings. It eschews the projected images of the original duet performance—a lot of which featured the men in Elizabeth’s life—to create an intimate space between Elizabeth and the audience, Meneghini says.

She performed “Elizabeth I: In Her Own Words” several times in New York City before her 14 performances at Edinburgh Fringe, where it was a hit.

“People there are crazy about their royals,” Meneghini says with a laugh. “Elizabeth is not a popular monarch in Scotland; in fact, she’s almost an antagonist. So, when I first performed it in New York, people went nuts about it, but I didn’t think they were going to like it as much in Scotland, so that was a happy surprise.

“In fact, I went to do this photo shoot at Craigmillar Castle, where Mary Queen of Scots convalesced and planned her husband’s murder, and people were coming up to me—I was in full regalia—and saying, ‘Oh, Queen Mary, Queen Mary.’ So, I had to say, ‘No, I’m Elizabeth,’ and they’d run away.”

Thanks to the play’s reception at Edinburgh Fringe, Meneghini is now developing it into a full, 120-minute performance. She also will perform it Oct. 19 in the And still, she says, there’s always more to learn about Elizabeth.

“One of my biggest takeaways (from performing at Edinburgh Fringe) was people came out of the show saying, ‘Oh, my gosh, I have a totally different perspective of her as a person. She wasn’t this awful woman, she really struggled with these decisions that she made,’” Meneghini says. “What I’ve learned in my own research with her is that she was a complicated person like we all are, didn’t take any of the decisions that she had to make in her life lightly. When I’m doing the show—whether it’s here, when I was in Edinburgh—I’m constantly reading more about her, and every day is bringing something new.”

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