Much Ado About Nothing

Shakespeare in Central Park
June 22-August 7, 2004
Review by: Feste

Maybe times will change. Maybe the day will come when fathers do not sigh as their rambunctious daughters turn overnight into lovely young women, courted by virile young men. Maybe Dads will stop solacing themselves with visions of dancing that inevitable dance with a bride who reminds him of the girl he married and the boy he was. But not yet. Mental customs change more slowly than do the external rites and rituals of social life. For Sam Waterston, however, no sorrow could taint the sheer joy of taking into his arms his beautiful daughter Elisabeth and dancing the formal dance which opens Much Ado About Nothing. Waterston's own part in the dance of life, love, and theater may have changed since the days he played Benedick. But playing Leonato to his daughter's Hero must be a dream come true.

Shakespeare's comedy opened for previews at the Delacorte Theatre in New York's Central Park on June 22. That was the second longest day of the year. As nature would have it, the 22nd was also the muggiest day of the year. An orange-shirted staff worker told me that daylong showers not only held back the usual crowd but also forced stalwarts to jump puddles inside and outside the Delacorte. Ah! the challenge of playing plays that old-fashioned way: outdoors. And ah! the rewards. On the 23rd I watched one of my favorite plays under a deep blue sky lit by a bow moon. Venus was not yet in the Moon's arms but that planetary star did twinkle above the orange groves and grape arbors of an early twentieth century Sicilian villa.

All nineteen hundred seats of the Delacorte's own sickle arc were filled. That's a few hundred shy of those who watched this same yet different play under the same yet different moon and star of Shakespeare's Globe more than 400 years ago. Shakespeare's audience got to stand for a penny. We got actual seats. For free. And each lucky ticket holder became part of the "we" who watched and laughed and applauded and left that city park pleased. Reassured, if only for a time, that this silly old planet of our own might keep on spinning. That somehow the young, like love, would endure even if customs change and generation succeeds generation.

I entered the Delacorte with unusual anxiety. I knew I would be reviewing the play for ...and here's to you, Mr. Waterston and therefore with an eye to the Waterstons. I also knew the Waterstons had bit parts. Leonato is just a variant of the senex figure, the old man who usually stands in the way of love. Hero is just a conventional "sweet young thing" lacking in self-esteem, bound to her father's will. What if A) Sam and/or Elisabeth were not that good and B) so what if they were, since this play belongs to Beatrice and Benedick? Heh. Talk about revelations. I have seen four professional productions of Much Ado in the last 10 months and taught the play for 30 years. But I knew nothing. While staying absolutely true to Shakespeare's text, director David Esbjornson recovered a comedy untainted by the last hundred year's of performance history. He and Sam Waterston made it quite clear that Leonato is as essential to Shakespeare's play as is Benedick, the reluctant lover Sam once helped enshrine as the play's "only male lead."

Esbjornson's reading of a strong Hero has less textual support than does his vision of Leonato. He ultimately resorts to gimmickry to bolster the role. But casting Sam's true-life daughter as Hero is not one of the gimmicks. That fortuitous circumstance (however brokered) did make for some fine inside jokes (Elisabeth takes a bath on stage, as did Sam) but Elisabeth Waterston, asked yet again to make sense of a bifurcated character, plays her role with panache.

The entire cast is strong. And tall. This may be the tallest production of Much Ado ever performed. Kirsten Johnston is a big, solid, funny, confident Beatrice. Her Beatrice does not hide neuroses behind wit-she's just very witty. And kind. Johnston becomes a metaphoric vibrotonist when she delivers Beatrice's response to Don Pedro's seeming offer of courtship. She begins to joke, she perceives the Duke's pain, she grasps the complexity of the situation, she deflects her own witticism about Don Pedro's high station, turns it into an apology and a compliment. Johnston also makes Beatrice's most infamous love-test ("Kill Claudio") seem like an eminently sensible request. The audience laughed with glee just when the play usually grows darkest.

Jimmy Smits is tall enough to play against Johnston's Beatrice, but he may need the full preview period to meld the parts of this new Benedick. In some ways, he has been handed a problem parallel to that of E. Waterston. He has been asked to play against the type Benedick has himself become-the romantic hidden within the hardened shell of a satirist if not a cynic. Smits plays a brash, bold, but not particularly smart Benedick in the first half of the play. He looks great, and that matters because Smits knows how to act his looks. But in the second half of the production, when Benedick usually emerges as the devoted lover, Smits seems almost unmanned by love. For the first time, I didn't think Benedick worthy of Beatrice. Of course Orsino doesn't deserve Viola and Orlando is just dumb lucky to get Rosalind. But Beatrice and Benedick? I'm sorry, but they must fit together like--like Antony and Cleopatra in their salad days. I hope Esbjornson and Smits ultimately find a way to preserve a powerful Leonato without sacrificing a glow-happy feeling about B&B.

And there's no question that presenting Leonato as a smart, passionate, and traditional (rather than tradition-blinded) elder gentleman with a young daughter has flummoxed Smits. Not only does Leonato get the first line in the play, Waterston gets the first dance. This time, Sam is not in the exurbs of New Haven where he deliberately deferred to the young. The Delacorte is his stage and stage-acting is his craft, his past and his future. This time, he plays for keeps. Sam can take over the stage by just sitting on a well, peeling an orange and throwing the rind down on the head of a "hidden" Benedick. He can spit (real spit) at Claudio and make the audience gasp. Give him lines to deliver and suddenly Waterston's understanding of those lines makes clear what Shakespeare wanted from Leonato. He is a man concerned about the changing of custom, afraid that the times may be leaving him behind, aware that he is old while Benedick and Claudio are young. I caught my breath when Leonato berated Claudio with the words, "Tush, tush man; never fleer and jest at me/I speak not like a dotard or a fool/As under privilege of age to brag/What I have done being young or would do/Were I not old." Change stagecraft for swordsmanship and these are lines Waterston (or Shakespeare) could speak under privilege of age and experience to the upstarts both have faced.

To understand Much Ado as having more to do with permanence and change, with self-image and social status, with age and youth and changing world orders rather than just peopling that world is to realize how much higher a place this play deserves in the ranks of Shakespeare's double-plotted comedies. I will never look at the text of Much Ado About Nothing the same way again. I don't know when a production of a very familiar play last did that for me. Thank you, cast, director and designers of the Delacorte production.

Nevertheless, in coming to such an insight, both the director and his seasoned actor may have tilted the scales a bit too far. Time will tell. But on that second night of previews, Sam played Leonato as old. Really old. Just a bit younger than Dominic Chianese's hysterically funny but dotteringly ancient Antonio, brother to Leonato. My long-suffering husband (dragged to three of those four productions mentioned above, and to Lady With a Lapdog, and to The Black Monk) proclaimed, "Sam is doing his stooped act again."

I praised Sam's physical acumen when he perfected that stoop for his hyperkinetic 80 year old arborist in Rabe's play but here I just wanted to run on stage and yell, "Straighten that back man or you'll regret it in inches a few years from now." (My once 6'4" now 6' 3" husband held me back. He fears what I am capable of under the influence of art. We were almost ejected from The Public Theater during Vanessa Redgrave's insanely inane production of Antony and Cleopatra. I mean really, Cleopatra as Bo Peep on a swing and Enobarbus dumped dead into a laundry basket?)

I digress. The thing is, Waterston's true age (63) and true vitality (bottle and sell it please) would better suit Ebsjornson's deepest insights. As with Smits, I have a feeling much of Sam's over-reaction (and maybe a bit of his foot-stomping) will lighten when the play formally opens. Everything about this version of Much Ado promises that when it ends, Leonato and Benedick should see each other at opposite ends of time's abysm. And smile at the recognition.

Then again, despite all his best efforts, unlike the gentically blessed Waterstons, Smits looks his age; he may just be too old for this part. (We should all look so good at either of these mens' ages. Sam is back in a beard, but dapperly trimmed; he gets to wear nifty linen suits and two great hats. Jimmy is, uhm, athletic in his naval gear).The twenty-seven year old Elisabeth Waterston can play twenty with conviction.

Ms. Waterston is a beautiful woman, not merely a "pretty" one. Her looks will last. May they not lead her into temptation or typecasting. Height might serve as the necessary block to such folly. That and her own intelligence. Like her father, EW understands what she is saying. And since last fall's production of Lady With a Lapdog, Elisabeth has gained vocal control. The Delacorte is miked for a pin drop, but it's not projection that here marks Elisabeth's growth. It's her ability, like and yet different from Johnston's, to cover a range of emotions with inflection. And she has a deep, melodic voice, a wonderful laugh.

But Shakespeare has given Hero little to say in the first half of his play. She has thus been performed as shallow, an obedient daughter as willingly married to Don Pedro as to Claudio if that is what father wants. Given the terms of this production, Elisabeth Waterston looks for the unwritten line, "making eyes" at Claudio and "watching how Beatrice does it." Wise choices but as yet too subtle for those who haven't seen four other Heros in ten months. If Dad straightens up and shakes off some of his method, he should leave the excess to Elisabeth. Then her emergence at play's end as a strong woman who needs proof of Claudio's love before she will be married off will make sense. As will the intervening wedding scene. There both Waterstons command the stage.

Hero is first berated by Claudio as a whore then renounced by her own father. Sam and Elisabeth, with their characters' anger, dismay, and new view of each other performed to perfection, turn the scene into a toe-curler. The house grew silent as an incredulous daughter pleaded with her outraged and too credulous father to take her part. The Watersons created visceral tension on stage and in the audience; they surprised us into silence. All 1,900 of us. Elisabeth's stomach-clenched exit made Hero into a real person. One we cared about.

Fortunately, we also have a charming rather than merely callow Claudio to match her with. Lorenzo Pisoni is as dashing as his name. His Claudio is the kind of guy who breaks girls' hearts without noticing. Usually doomed to become a shadow of a man in Benedick's sunlight, this Claudio matters. And he matters because Waterston's Hero matters.

Peter Francis James plays an equally charming and rather (deliberately) effete Don Pedro; his gullibility becomes culpability when he chooses to trust his untrustworthy brother, Don John. Christopher Evan Welch plays the evil brother as a wonderfully slimey "futurist" (a.k.a. "decadent") rebel with no cause but self. He is pitch-perfect. And also tall.

Nobody knows what to do with the Dogberry plot. This overplot is pure verbal farce; our language, if not that custom, has changed too much for easy comprehension. But the (tall) Brian Murray manages to convey the essential good will he and his blundering constables bring to any proper reception of comedy.

Set designer Christine Jones renders a beautiful and functional Messina, Sicily. Special kudos for paralleling Benedick's hiding in a well to Beatrice's grape stomping when each overhears their friends speak of love. Everyone around me, however, knew that Beatrice should step out of that vat with purple feet and we were all disappointed when she didn't. Some punchlines need to be delivered or don't set up the joke! (And there is a way to produce purple feet without ruining the stage. I figured it out on the way home. Try your own solution. Maybe we can have a write-in contest).

A slap on the knuckles, however, for misusing--and for not sportingly abusing--Sicilian Catholicism. It was smart to incorporate a "family priest" (Steven Skybell) with a grand singing voice right into the production; doing so also enhanced his role as Hero's advocate in the crucial betrayal scene. BUT, as my once taller, ex-seminarian, still long-suffering husband duly complained, "Someone needs to teach the current generation how to wear a biretta properly." (That would be unattractively straight across the brow, as in the picture his children refer to as "Father Father"). Unlikely Latin dirges should also be avoided when perfectly appropriate ones are ready to hand. (I'm a bit suspicious of that second charge but he who recites Latin trumped me with the card of experience). The greatest misuse of Catholic ritual, however was using with too much solemnity a supposed statue of the Virgin Mary.

Esbjornson wants his Hero to witness Claudio's repentance at her supposed grave. He does so by lifting a scene from The Winter's Tale. At the end of that late romance, a statue comes to life. Here, during the night-time procession to Hero's grave, the living Hero is disguised as a statue of the Virgin, carried in procession. Huh? At least, that's what I heard muttered around me, especially by those who could not see EW quietly turn her head. Well now, if you are going to use such a gimmick and do so in the home of Little Italy, go for the laughs and risk the offense, as comedy always must. Pin lire notes to that Madonna's robes. Let her be carried by a thinly disguised but repentant father and uncle peaking from under their cloaks. Make the procession a deliberately silly intrusion on the mournful musicians Claudio has hired. Have some fun, for heaven's sake!

Without a deus ex machina, however, this production ends joyously. Benedick calls for a celebration to suit the times; he gets the last lines. Claudio gets the last dance. In contrast to the opening scene, this is a "modern" dance. The sweetest of ironies came in watching Sam Waterston watch daughter Elisabeth break free and dance with evident glee, allowing Pisoni to swing her in the air and twirl her over his back as only the young can do. Vere dignum et justum est.