Much Ado About Nothing

Much Ado About Nothing explores the proposition that human feelings are the product of argument and declaration.  Theorists of religion have long known that nothing is really believed until it is publicly proclaimed -- hence, liturgies and creeds that demand public verbal assent.  Shakespeare's innovation in this profound comedy is to apply this thesis to romantic love.  In Much Ado, the characters are always either talking themselves (or others) in or out of love.  The report that Beatrice loves Benedict, although all the evidence seems to be to the contrary, inspires Benedict to frenzied soliloquies in which he takes the cue supplied by others to literally talk himself into passionate, romantic love.  Beatrice does the same thing.  Shakespeare's universe is strangely symmetrical and lucid -- if people can be talked into love, they can also be talked into the most savage jealousy and hatred.  The play demonstrates this truth as well, skating (like all Shakespeare's comedies) along the wrathful edge of tragedy, but, somehow, at the last minute, averting the catastrophe. 

Door County Shakespeare's production of Much Ado (I saw the show on July 23) is presented at the Bjorklunden estate on the east flank of the peninsula jutting into Lake Michigan just south of Bailey's Harbor.  The stage is reached by a winding road that leads from the inland State Highway through a dense woods to some clearings a hundred yards or so away from the mild grassy shoreline.  (Be careful on the road:  you are apt to encounter deer.)  The Bjorklunden estate and gardens are now a conference center for the University of Wisconsin and there is a sort of manor house in the woods and a big dark chapel, erected on the model of a Norwegian Stavekirche, screened by sepulchral looking evergreens. Folding chairs are set on risers facing a great, hoary maple tree.  A wooden platform fronts the maple tree and there is a kind of treehouse erected ten or twelve feet above the platform accessed by two sets of wooden steps.  Lanterns hang down from the trees upper branches and there are also some spotlights suspended in the foliage behind the audience to illumine the stage.  A wooden wall backs the tree as seen from the audience so that characters can make entrances from one side or the other -- there are 'tiring rooms, a kind of privy-shaped shack 50 feet or so behind the stage in the shrubbery:  if you are distracted, you can see actors advancing toward the stage from that place.  The audience area probably seats about 100 people -- when I attended (on a Monday night), there were probably 50 people at the show.  Toilets consist of portapotties near the parking lot.  The company consists of about 15 actors and so some roles have to be doubled.  The actors were all highly proficient, spoke the verse well, and performed with great enthusiasm and aplomb.  The company consisted largely of the kind of well-trained, excellent actors who are not quite handsome or beautiful enough to succeed on Tv or on Broadway -- nonetheless, I thought them just as well-spoken and effective as the actors I have seen on the Great White Way or at the Guthrie Theater.  An example is the fellow who played Benedict -- he was a little swarthy man with a big nose and a cocky strut:  frankly speaking, too short to be commanding as a matinee idol, but, nonetheless, seen at close-range (and the proximity at this show was merciless) extremely compelling.  Similarly, the woman playing Hero was not conventionally beautiful -- even, perhaps, a little homely -- but she was very good and it was refreshing to see the glamor part played by someone with an ordinary appearance.  (Beatrice was played by a very beautiful woman and, reviewing her credits in the program, her curriculum vita includes Hollywood, TV, and independently produced movies.)  The presentation of the play was lucid, direct, and easily understood.  The show is directed to make vivid use of the surrounding forest and its pathways.  Actors enter the play from all sides and, sometimes, we hear people singing or talking in the dense forest.  At one point, Benedict, who is eavesdropping on two men who are enticing him into love for Beatrice, sneaks into the audience -- he lurks in the first row, hiding his face behind a program and, then, disappears.  At a key moment in the dialogue on-stage, a funny bit of speech, as we are intently watching the action, Benedict pops out of hiding and smartly whacks one of the audience members right on the top of his head, slapping the poor fellow's bald spot with a loud "whap!", startling the audience and, needless to say, the foil of this jest.  (I know -- I was the one slapped on the crown with the program.)  All of this is very amusing and crowd-pleasing. 

When the villain, Don John, is first discovered, we see him wearing a Union army blue uniform, saturnine with the red face of a drinker, protesting that he is a man of few words.  Don John is clearly a prototype for Iago in Othello -- his motive for sowing discord among the troops returned from the war is completely undisclosed.  The conceit of the play as here directed is that the soldiers have returned from the Civil War to Door County and that the action takes place around a Fourth of July celebration at one of the big manors on the peninsula.  At one point a banner for a Wisconsin regiment is unfurled and there is red, white, and blue bunting on the stage.  Door County references abide.  Everyone is always drinking cherry cider and big crates of fresh cherries are stacked on stage.  Several excellent songs enliven the action performed by a small blue-grass group -- each musician also plays a part in the action.  In one of the songs, the musicians mimic picking cherries and firing muskets, harmonizing that they would rather be a "picker than a soldier."  (This is all anachronistic since the famous cherry orchards on the Door peninsula were not planted until the 1890's and didn't characterize the landscape until after World War One.)  Of course, Don John turns out to be pretty proficient in speech, traducing Hero to the extent that her fiancée denounces her as a whore and her own father disowns her.  The same passion that flared upon the recommendation of others now turns to vicious cruelty on the same hearsay basis.  Benedict and Beatrice confer as to what should be done and there is an absolutely spine-chilling moment when Beatrice, who seems the sunny soul of mirth, demands that her new lover murder Don John.  She is absolutely serious and her challenge curdles the play's happiness into something approaching terror.  Words murder in Shakespeare.  Of course, the calamity, multiple corpses piled up on stage as in the tragedies, is avoided.  Significantly, the mechanism for saving the characters from slaughtering one another is Dogberry and his inept Night-watch.  Dogberry can bare speak any English at all and, so, it seems is  immunized from the gales of libel and slander that have overtaken the company of soldiers and their ladies.  Too much speech is deadly and it takes a buffoon who can scarcely speak to break the malign enchantment that has seized the characters in the play.

It was dark after intermission and the beams of the spotlights illumined thousands of mosquitos hovering anxiously over the audience.  I think the area where the audience was seated had been treated with a powerful bug-repellant -- the haze of mosquitos didn't dare to descend into the audience.  But it was disconcerting to say the least to see that vast cloud of mosquitos forming a canopy over the crowd watching the show.