From
Current Biography, September, 1985:
By all accounts, Waterston’s most successful
Sahkespearean creation was Benedick in A.J> Antoon’s sunlit production of Much
Ado About Nothing, the final attraction of the Festival’s 1972 summer
season at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park. Transposed form sixteenth-century Messina to turn-of-the-century
small-town America. Much Ado took
on a relevance often missing in more traditional stagings. As Benedick, the misogynistic soldier turned
languishing suitor, Waterston easily held his own in repartee with the rapier-tongued
Beatrice of Kathleen Widdoes, but he never lost sight of the character’s
essentially romantic nature, and when he eventually discovered his love—“half-knowingly,
but with astonishment nonetheless,” as Laurence I. Barett observed in his
review for Time [August 28, 1972]—he was ‘like a child finding the tooth fairy’s
silver dollar.” One of the biggest hits
in the history of the New York Shakespeare Festival, Much Ado About Nothing was
transplanted to the Winter Garden Theater on Broadway in November, 1972. A television version was broadcast by CBS-TV
the following February. For his
contribution, Sam Waterston, who was, in Laurence Barrett’s words, “Benedick to
the last corpuscle,” took home a Drama Desk Award, a New York Drama Critics
Circle Award, and an Obie.