“This one night performance by the Ducdame Ensemble of New York (presented at The Adobe Rose by the International Shakespeare Center of Santa Fe) shot through the audience like a bullet: consistently riveting, sometimes brusque, sometimes perplexing, sometimes shocking, like a high-energy direct hit of singing poetry, and at other times like an exercise in rapid-fire bardic snippets. 

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Call it whatever you will: a tapestry, a compilation, a “mix tape” of passionate and violent passages, drawn from scenes involving women in Shakespeare’s cycle of history plays. Dames of Thrones had the punch, the considerable pluses (and possibly a few of the drawbacks) of a surprise attack. 

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The show announces its genre-bending sensibilities at the very beginning, as thirteen male and female actors in “cool” contemporary clothes (the set otherwise consists of a few chairs) perform group mirror games and pantomimes -- couples meet, swear allegiances, couples break apart or are broken by shadowy third parties. The background music suggests a courtly setting. 

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This is a world where nobody can be unconditionally loved and trusted. The Shakespearean canon veers between extremes of the beautiful and the terrible, high comedy and romance, and sinister terrors; and by focusing on the terrors Dames of Thrones is truly a production whose themes have a short distance to travel to match the power-hungry prurience of the TV series “Game of Thrones” an apt pun. 

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Having cued the audience appropriately, the remainder of the two hour performance is a miasma of grief, loss, war and pillaging, in scenes (slightly edited) that suggest the plights of the female protagonists from plays such as King John, Richard iii, Henry iv, and Henry vi. 

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That means that over two hours you will not encounter the more familiar Shakespearean heroines. No Lady Macbeth. No Ophelia. Nor King Lear’s three daughters. And of course sans easily recognized heroines, Dames of Thrones is short on familiar stories and monologues. 

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But you will experience oblique glimpses into the lives of several of Shakespeare’s female royal protagonists, who feature in plays that even by Shakespeare’s standards have extremely complex plots. They are women of high standing (though Joan la Pucelle, aka Joan of Arc is thrown in for good measure.) They have names that are preceded by “Lady” -- Lady Kate, Lady Anne and Lady Constance. The bitter irony is that they lead constricted lives, and they suffer insults and injury in a sexist world that puts women on par with servants. “Lady” is often a pointless title. 

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Throughout the evening these women are put in the position of using their last resource, meaning their feminine wiles to convince a man to do some honorable deed, or not follow through with some foolhardy measure. Or an outright cruel folly. The women hold their ground using lovely iambic rhythms; they sally with clever retorts. But essentially they’re always pleading a case. …

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These selections from the history plays (at their best) become a sociological study of marriage and sex privilege in Elizabethan times. Shakespeare was not a particularly historically accurate writer, but when he wrote about real historical Kings, Queens, and Ladies, he touched on real travails. The fact that these people really lived strengthens Dames of Thrones’ sociological power.”