With the role of Rosalind, comes about 400 years of baggage- every theatre person has an expectation of who she is and why she is one of the greatest female characters Shakespeare has ever written. Literary analysts call her things like: the most perfect human being, more intelligent than all of the audience combined, the female "Hamlet."
Harold Bloom says: "If Rosalind cannot please us, then no one in Shakespeare or elsewhere in literature ever will."
Talk about pressure.... Whew! How on earth is one supposed to play that on stage? Okay, Meera, now go be a perfect human soul. Now! Hmmm...what?
Needless to say, at some point I had to let go of all these voices. And I realized - perfection is not a thing that actually exists. Maybe the best I can do is just be myself. To trust that I am a unique individual and play this character in a way where only I, Meera Kumbhani, could play her. And from there, I realized that there was something even better about her than perfection: simple humanity. In a way, she is an 'everyman.' (and, of course, everywoman.) Meaning that, everybody falls in love with Rosalind as a character because everybody can see something in her that they can relate to. Within this story, she experiences the full spectrum of emotion - from grief to lust to mistrust to jealousy to love. And those emotions are the stuff of life. Without them, we have nothing.
Sometimes my dream in life is to work on nothing but Shakespeare. I say these speeches in performance every day now in this show, and yet everyday I learn a handful more about what I really am saying, and what the words and metaphors are alluding to, and how these phrases are making me feel. There is so much meaning in every single one of his words that I could spend a lifetime learning about these characters. I am a young actor and I have so much to learn about EVERYTHING Shakespeare has given us and how his words and images move through us.
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