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For members of a certain generation, the first thing that comes to mind when they hear Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing is the charming 1993 romantic comedy starring Kenneth Branaugh, Emma Thompson, and a scheming Keanu Reeves.
The Actors Ensemble of Berkeley’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s gossip comedy in the historic amphitheater of John Hinkel Park instead delves deeper into the play’s tragic moments and explores themes of redemption and forgiveness.
The nonprofit theater company, which has performed in Berkeley for over 50 years, plans to take some creative liberties with Shakespeare’s work.
The original play is set in the 16th century. Your play is set in 2024. The actors carry cell phones and iPads and wear modern clothing. The gender roles of some of the main characters, including Beatrice and Benedick, have been reversed. Leonato, Hero’s father, has been rewritten as Leonora, her mother.
The character Hero, seen by some as a helpless victim of patriarchy, is portrayed in a different light by making her a modern woman and “giving her the power of forgiveness,” according to director Glenn Havlan, who adapted the screenplay with Gaby Schneider.
Despite these changes, Havlan insists they have preserved the spirit of what makes Shakespeare Shakespeare.
While some festivals, including the prestigious Oregon Shakespeare Festival, have attempted in recent years to “translate” Shakespeare into contemporary English to make him more understandable, Havlan, a diehard Shakespeare fan who estimates he has acted in or directed 40 productions of 20 different Shakespeare plays, disagrees with the practice.
“Shakespeare invented modern English,” said Havlan. “To put it in a more modern colloquial way, he takes away the power, the poetry, the music, the rhythm.”
The two-hour shows begin at 4 p.m. and run Saturday and Sunday afternoons from June 29 through July 14. Admission is free, but reservations are encouraged and donations are welcome. Hot dogs, veggie dogs and corn on the cob are available for purchase during intermission. There is a bonus show on Thursday, July 4.
Havlan, a Pacifica resident who works as a facilities manager for the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department by day, spoke with Berkeleyside ahead of his directorial debut with the Actors Ensemble of Berkeley. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you get into theater?
I’ve been doing theater since high school, even a little earlier. I’ve also played guitar and bass and focused on music for quite a long time in my late teens and early twenties.
When I went back to college (San Francisco State University), I happened to see that they were doing A Midsummer Night’s Dream. So I auditioned, played the role of Oberon, and got back into the role. That was over 40 years ago now.
Was that your introduction to Shakespeare?
Not at all. I didn’t get into Shakespeare because I was interested in the theater. I got into the theater because I was into Shakespeare. I had some friends who were similarly fascinated by Shakespeare and we read him, we acted out scenes from him and that’s always been my main interest for the last, I don’t know, 12 years or so.
*Do you have a favorite Shakespeare play?
My favorite Shakespeare play is King Lear. I don’t know if it’s his best, but I just love it. The characters are fascinating, the tragic flaw is compelling, and it just doesn’t get any better. It starts off ominous, gets worse and worse, and is just relentless in its darkness, ending with everyone dying. The progression of this play is methodically tragic.
*Would you say that Much Ado About Nothing is at the other end of the spectrum as a lighter comedy?
That’s it. It’s basically a double love story. It’s an interesting piece – it’s hard to say whether it’s about Hero and Claudio or Beatrice and Benedick. It’s about two couples on similar but not really parallel paths to marriage.
Beatrice and Benedick are older, more experienced and have already decided that marriage is not for them, so they have to change their minds. They watch the love affair between Claudio and Hero very closely and see how much of what they fear comes true. But once they sort it out and it’s over, they can admit that it’s a good thing and that they should get together too.
There are moments of absolute tragedy, though. The fiasco at the wedding and the way the characters react in that moment is absolutely tragic. I’m fascinated by characters in Shakespearean comedies who don’t know they’re in a comedy. In that wedding scene, where the mother – originally the father, but we’ve changed it – is horrified and shocked by what she thinks is her daughter’s behavior, she says some horrible things and is devastated. There’s nothing funny about that at all.
Although there are serious moments in Shakespeare’s other comedies, I don’t know if there is a point at which a character becomes as desperately tragic as Leonato, or in our case Leonora.
*Why did you decide to swap the gender roles of Beatrice and Benedick?
To bring it up to date. It’s been 400 years since Shakespeare wrote these plays and there have been countless places and times where there were really apt parallels to what was happening in the plays. Most of them are very adaptable to different times and places. I once directed The Merchant of Venice in modern costume. There are a number of other plays you can do that with and that was our experiment – to see what is revealed in the play when you put it in the present day, take it out of the doublet and tights and make it more recognisable on the surface.
You also often hear that Beatrice and Benedick are so similar and fit together so well because they are basically the same person. Let’s try that out. We had the character Benedick played by a woman and the character Beatrice played by a man.
Benedick is a soldier and an officer in the original story. Now, in 2024, there are women who are soldiers and officers, and so she can inhabit this world in a way that she wouldn’t have been able to 400 years ago. The play is a lot about what it means to be a man or a woman, so we’re exploring what happens when we switch that around.
Can you tell me more about your decision to transform Leonato, Hero’s father, into Leonora, her mother?
This was not just about creating more roles for women, which is a very noble goal, but it was particularly about transforming the relationship between Leonato and Hero into a mother-daughter relationship, to explore how much of the patriarchy that is very evident in this play is inherently male or inherently institutional, and how much of it affects the individual characters featured in this drama.
Why is Shakespeare still relevant today?
Because they deal with the most basic human problems. They don’t always deal with every single one of them – they come and go. There were times when Shakespeare plays were banned. After the Second World War, The Merchant of Venice couldn’t be performed for decades. And modern feminism in the 60s and 70s made The Taming of the Shrew impossible for a very long time.
It’s not that we’ve changed our mindset that makes us feel like these plays aren’t relevant. It’s because there are other things happening in the plays that have made us realize that they go deeper than the current social issues they address in a negative way.
The characters in Shakespeare’s plays are not superficial people. They do things that are unexpected, they do things for no reason, they do things for reasons that anyone who has ever been human in the last hundred thousand years can understand. They are really real people and they are really adaptable.
