Donna Wilshire… …is an experienced, dynamic teacher and dedicated mentor. She has taught in theatre and fine arts departments in major universities (Purdue, Indiana, Rutgers Universities,  among others).   She became a professional actress when she was a young woman, and over the years performed on stages Off-Broadway in New York City, across the midlands to California, and north into Canada, as well as in soap operas on national television (as a member of Actors Equity, AGVA, and AFTRA).  

Donna has been producer-director of her own regional community theatres each of which she designed to serve as an educational as well as recreational resource for that particular  community. 

She has taken her productions to professional theatres and college stages, into inner-city churches as well as cathedrals, outdoors to city plazas, street corners, rustic camps, even into meadows and forests. She has led whole classes of pre-schoolers and their teachers into exciting adventures via creative dramatics. 

Donna has lectured widely on her favorite subjects: the Old Ways, the power and humaneness of the Oral Tradition, and the lives of women throughout the ages (all one subject to Donna) — across the U.S.A., in England, Canada, and Peru.  She has also led retreat-workshops — which she combines with storytelling and drumming — at many different colleges, community centers, wherever people like to gather. 

Scholar - Playwright - Storyteller - Ritualist

Donna adapted and directed Aristophanes’ ancient Greek comedy “Lysistrata” to augment her students' understanding of Theatre History (at Rider College) as well as for the belly laughs the play gives  audiences today.  She also wrote “Daughters of Liberty,” an “exciting, rousing, spellbinding” play with period music, celebrating sixteen real women who fought in the American Revolution (produced at Rutgers University). 

One woman shows:  Over the decades Donna has written many scripts that she performs alone:  “Molly Bloom” (adapted from James Joyce), “The Goddess and Her Myths” (taken from her book VIRGIN MOTHER CRONE), and the ever-growing “Old Wise Tales.” 

The Old Ways:  For over twenty years she has focused her research and writing on the lives of our predecessors who thrived in early egalitarian, mother-centered, Nature-revering societies.  She finds that those Old Ways of thinking can offer profound, practical options to women and men today, helping us expand our abilities to appreciate Nature and showing us how to discover and follow our own Path. 

Donna demonstrates how those time-honored, tried-and-true perspectives can become an exciting, beneficial part of our everyday lives by means of:

•   — her publications (BOOKS, ARTICLES, PLAYS),
•   — her evocative bardic storytelling (“Old Wives Tales”),
•   — carefully designed and executed WORKSHOP-RETREATS.

To schedule events in your community CONTACT DONNA.  

Personal Statement:

The heart of my work is creating stories, characters and behaviors that model the kind of life, community, and world I aspire to for myself, my loved ones, as well as for my enemies. 

I do not accept that a competitive dog-eat-dog world is “just the way things are.”  I do not accept that competition and striving for comfort and convenience are the highest human values—not even the norm we must all accept--for individuals, families, communities, or nations.  The point of all of my work--in any medium--is to re-vision what it means to be a woman and a man on this glorious Planet Earth.

There is no denying that when cut-throat, dog-eat-dog competitive behavior is allowed, even encouraged, or declared to be normal by priests and scholars [“The Selfish Gene” and so forth], then that kind of behavior is what we get.  What we claim is what we get.  Claims become self-fulfilling prophecies. 

I want another kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. 

In all of my work--in different media, for different kinds of audiences—I tell stories that contain models of behaviors that will in turn create for me (and for you if you so desire) a cooperative, mutually supportive society and world.

Mother-centered cultures: Happily, I have not had to invent these models or these stories.  They have existed all over our Blue and Green Globe from time out of memory.  Our primal ancestors had no luxuries to compare to our modern comforts and conveniences, but they lived happily—even ecstatically—in what has been called “the original affluent society”—“affluence” meaning that everyone had all of the necessities, everything he or she needed to survive and thrive.  No one was left out of the bounty—everyone shared what there was.   Everyone was rich;  no one was poor.  No one. 

These foreparents of ours lived “outside” in Nature, in a world that they perceived as pulsing with Life and Being.  Nature was seen to be Life-creating, Life-supporting, Life-nourishing . . . like a good mother . . . The world was humankind’s ubiquitous mother:  Mother Nature.

The men and women who perceived Nature to be a Divine Female who was the Source of all Life and central to the workings of the cosmos, were comparing Mother Nature to ordinary human mothers who (anyone one could see) were the source of human life, central to the functioning of families, and absolutely essential to the whole of society.  We can only imagine the kind of respect and personal authority early women enjoyed when everybody—men and women—traced their family ties through their mothers and their mother’s mothers . . . all the way back to their Original Source: the Great Mother: that is, to the Cosmic Mother, Mother Nature.

We have comforts and conveniences today that our earliest ancestors could not have imagined.... would not have desired.  But the differences between us are superficial, for our basic human nature cannot have changed from those times to these times. 

I am interested in reclaiming that primal perception of what a human being is, of what Nature is, along with that original mother-centered, egalitarian social form.

My Resume:

I want the things I have done in the past to be seen as my efforts to help all men and women visualize and create the world as Life-giving and Nourishing..  I offer my stories—in their many forms—in hopes that they might inspire people to create their own characters and stories, make their own models to follow that will help them create a Life-supporting, Life-affirming world, models that will give them their own self-fulfilling prophecy to live into.

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