About this ebook
For the story of how Tina Packer came to the United States and started Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts, read Tina Packer Builds A Theater
About the author
Tina Packer is Founding Artistic Director of Shakespeare & Company, in Lenox, Massachusetts, an internationally acclaimed theatrical performance, training and education company, where she directed over 50 productions and acted in many more.
As a young English actress, she trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where she won the Ronson Award for Most Outstanding Performer, was an associate artist with the Royal Shakespeare Company, performed in the West End, and acted with repertory companies in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Leicester, and Coventry.
Her book, Power Plays: Shakespeare’s Lessons in Leadership & Management, was published in 2001. Her children's book Tales from Shakespeare was published in 2004. Along with acting, lecturing, directing, and writing, Tina continues to spearhead the international effort to reconstruct a historically accurate 1587 Rose Playhouse, where Shakespeare’s plays were first performed, in Lenox, Massachusetts.
Born in Prague in 1947, Helen Epstein grew up in New York City, where she graduated from Hunter College High School in 1965. She studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and became a journalist after the Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia of 1968 when her personal account was published in the Jerusalem Post. She became a university correspondent for that newspaper while still an undergraduate. Subsequently, she studied at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and began freelancing for diverse publications including the New York Times.
Her profiles of legendary musicians such as Vladimir Horowitz, Leonard Bernstein and Yo-Yo Ma are collected in Music Talks that, like Children of the Holocaust and Where She Came From, has been translated into several other languages. She herself is the translator of Heda Kovály's Under A Cruel Star and Vlasta Schönová's Acting in Terezín. Her biographies of Joseph Papp and Tina Packer grew out of her journalistic work. She has an active speaking career and has lectured at a wide variety of venues in Europe, and North and South America. She blogs for The Arts Fuse, a New England cultural web site.
