Much Ado About Justice
**warning: here be spoilers**
The Play
Much Ado About Nothing is my favorite Shakespearean play. In that, I am not alone. The play itself is an amazing comedic romp with a blatantly dark heart and a brilliant streak of feminism. A friend of mine who I shall refer to hereafter as “The Professor” (as she does, indeed, teach college courses in theater) has managed to deepen my appreciation of the play, even though I’ve loved it since I was a teen. Mentioning Much Ado in her presence unlocks lecture mode, and she will happily spend a great deal of time explaining how revolutionary this piece is, in that the core of the central love story involves a man being willing to overthrow the central order of his life out of respect for a woman’s judgement.
Now, I have my issues with the show, as do many other people. The character of Dogberry is (in my experience) generally incredibly tedious, and the highest compliment I can give any of the comedic actors that have tackled that role is that they made it tolerable. More significantly, for my fiery feminist heart, I truly loathe the plot arc of Hero. A demure, blushing maiden who wants only to be given to some important, handsome man; who is ruined by slander; who’s word counts for nothing in her own defense; and who, in the end, forgives the rat bastard who almost got her killed. Even thinking about it makes me clench my jaw.
For all that it is Hero’s piteous scenario which gives us the chance to experience the extraordinarily powerful tale of Beatrice and Benedict, it still leaves me with a foul taste in my mouth. I have always seen Hero’s tale as a bitter pill in an otherwise delightful piece.
Now, with that background in mind…
The Professor told me that I should watch the 2019 Shakespeare in the Park production of Much Ado About Nothing. She hadn’t finished it yet, but she’d seen about half and was positive it was worth watching. Not to mention, it’s currently streaming for free on PBS. So last night The Professor and I, along with our friend The Preacher, had a remote watch party of the production.
There are some things you should know about this production.
The first is that it is set in the spring of 2020. Now, in 2019 they didn’t know we would be facing a rampant plague, but they were aware of a number of the other things that were staging to be part of this cultural moment. That’s critical.
The second is that this is an all black production. That is also critical.
The show opens at the estate of Señor Leonato, a well to do gentleman, and father to Hero. The young male characters of the play (the Prince, his brother The Bad Guy, Benedict, and Claudio) are “away at war.” That is the scene in which we find ourselves. Many varying productions have chosen to incorporate music into the show, and this one does as well. Instead of a lilting lute, however, this production begins with the character of Beatrice emerging onto her balcony, singing an a cappella version of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On. The other major female characters (Hero, Margaret, and Ursula) join in, and merge America the Beautiful into the vocals. It’s beautiful, and well done, and entertaining. But, to be honest… I wasn’t sure where it was going.
That’s also important folks. I didn’t get where it was going. We’ll circle back around to this later.
The women finish singing, the actual canonical dialogue begins, and right on cue the messenger comes to let them know that the men are returning home from war. There’s an exchange in this opening scene that I’ve always disliked:
How many gentlemen have you lost in this action?
But few of any sort, and none of name.
Now… this production? They edited a bit.
How many have you lost in this action?
But few of any sort.
That’s it. THAT. IS. IT. And that’s when I first picked up my phone to text The Professor and The Preacher (because I certainly wasn’t going to talk over the dialogue—not then, at any rate). But I was too excited to sit on it. Because the original dialogue? Well… It’s SUPER CLASSIST! And very Ayn Rand-ey. Only the gentlemen matter, and the most important thing is that they haven’t lost anyone “of name.” It’s very dismissive of the actual, real live men who died in the fight. But this! This was so much better! I was so excited!
The men arrive from war. They are marching, carrying protest signs. “Hate is Not a Family Value.” “Now, More Than Ever, We Must Love.” “Restore Democracy Now.” “I Am a Person.”
I admit, gentle friends, I still didn’t get where they were going with it. I thought it was a clever way to represent war in modern times. And here’s another important thing that we’ll circle back to later on: I was so entrenched in my super feminist view of Much Ado, it was almost impossible for me to entertain the possibility of what they were setting up with this opening.
Now, the show was great. They had a Dogberry that I actually enjoyed. I mean, within my expectations of Dogberry. Beatrice and Benedict were by turns amusing and then very serious, in all the right moments. The choices made by Kenny Leon (the director) and Margaret Odette (the actress ) finally made me actually respect Hero somewhat. I have always loathed that character, and, at last, here was a production where I could maybe consider even liking her a bit. Honestly, it was so good, and so well done, and so engaging that, y’all, I straight up forgot the beginning. It had happened, it was an interesting modern take on opening this show, and it hadn’t grabbed me any more than that.
And then we got to the end.
The wedding party is dancing! Everything has ended well! Love has triumphed over slander, and we just know they’re all going to live happily ever after. It is a raucous, uproarious celebration.
And then the music fades, and police sirens begin in the background. The Prince calls out:
Formation!
FORMATION!
Hero and Beatrice, fear on their faces, kiss their loves goodbye and the soldiers take up their signs again, holding them high as they march off the stage to go confront the sirens. I caught my breath, watching the “I Am a Person” sign waving across the stage.
The household of Señor Leonato watch the soldiers go, and they begin to sing.
Lift every voice and sing
Til earth and heaven ring
Ring with the harmonies of li—
And Beatrice’s ringing voice cuts across them all.
FATHER, FATHER
We don’t need to escalate
War is not the answer
Only love can conquer hate
But we’ve got to find a way to bring some loving
Some loving
Here to today.
Oh… What’s going on?
And then, friends, I cried.
The Direction
Y’all, it took me until the final moments of the show, but I finally got it. If you haven’t yet, let me break it down for you real quick:
The central plot of the show is the story of Hero. Beatrice and Benedict’s love (which is what the show is mostly about) blooms in that framework, but it’s not the main series of events. The main series of events are as follows.
A member of an oppressed class (a woman) is going about her business, doing everything she should in life, perfectly within the bounds society has set for her.
A member of the privileged class (a man) makes a false accusation against her, based on very flimsy evidence.
Because of this accusation, she is cast aside. She is ruined. She is threatened with death. Simply because someone in power made a mistake, and assumed they were right, and did not choose to give any credence to the protestations of the oppressed individual that they were, in fact, innocent.
Now… does this sound at all familiar to anyone, in the context of current cultural events?
Kenny Leon took two very brief moments, at the beginning and the end of the play, and that, in conjunction with his use of an all black cast, made me see this play (which I have watched in multiple productions, and multiple times in each production) in a whole new light.
The plot of this story is about oppression. It is about the damage that can be done when those in power do not even stop to question their rightness. And it is, to a certain extent, about the fact that only those in power who do not blindly follow their fellows are truly worthy of love.
There are only two men in the play who do not turn against Hero. One is the priest, a character Shakespeare routinely uses as a voice of benevolent compassion in all his shows. The other is Benedict—the only male character in the show I have not screamed at, at one time or another. In fact, it is, in part, the actions of Benedict that keep Hero’s own father from killing her, on the word of a powerful man alone.
When the sobbing girl has been led from the stage, and Beatrice and Benedict are finally alone together, finally declaring their love, finally becoming united, Beatrice asks her newly declared love to do something for her. She asks him to avenge her cousin, and kill the man who wronged her. A man who just happens to be Benedict’s closest companion.
The Professor will tell you that this scene is why this show is so revolutionary, and I do not disagree with her. Benedict is a member of the nobility. His entire life is about serving the Prince. His entire history has been one of privilege. Not only that, he has been to war with these men. His own life is inextricably linked with theirs and asking him to kill his friend is not only asking him to wound his own heart but also to cast himself forever from the grace of the Prince, on whom his fortunes depend.
And yet, when he understands how serious Beatrice is, he goes to challenge Claudio. Not just because he loves her, but because he respects her. He sees her as an equal. And when she says that Claudio has wronged her cousin, he believes her.
Imagine that.
Y’all, when you strip out the scenes of comedic gold and the improbability of the foibles, Much Ado About Nothing is actually a very great ado about a very critical societal issue that plagues us to this day, and that we are seeing on what feels like an almost weekly basis on the news.
George Floyd
Breonna Taylor
Atatiana Jefferson
Stephon Clark
Philando Castille
Tamir Rice
Jacob Blake
I can’t even list them all. I don’t even know them all. But when the show ended with a raucous party of black people, broken up by police sirens, so that the soldiers had to rush out with their protest signs again, you can bet your ass that the names I did know all came rushing into my mind. And I finally saw where Kenny Leon had been going with it, from the beginning.
The parallel was there, for anyone to see it.
So, here’s a thought provoking question.
Why didn’t I see it?
The Reality
Friends, I believe in intersectional justice. We are not pursuing equality if we only want equality for our group. That’s not equality. That’s just joining the high rollers club.
The truth is, though, that comprehensive “woke-ness” is not a thing. We all have blind spots. Ironically, sometimes it is our very desire for justice in one regard that can lead us to the most glaring omissions. I have always been so focused on Much Ado as a feminist piece, I simply failed to ever consider that my favorite Shakespearean play could be applied in a much broader context. I could never, in a million years, even if I became an accomplished and well-regarded director, have come up with the idea to do what Kenny Leon did. I had a blind spot there.
I am grateful to this production for removing this blind spot.
I am not so arrogant to assume that I do not have many others.
There’s a lot of talk in the arts communities about representation. A lot of people pushing for broader representation. A lot of people pushing back. A lot of half measures, where there is only token representation, or systematically under-represented groups are allowed on stage or screen, but only to perform scripts written by white people, in scenes staged by white directors.
This production, in addition to being a brilliant stand alone piece, and in addition to being a new insight into a show I truly thought I knew well, is also an excellent example of why we need the kind of radical representation in the arts that minority communities have been too long denied.
Humanity learns through the stories we tell. Even the most factual account holds some thread of narrative, and we absorb those stories, and we learn from them. And while I had some vague idea of this before, Kenny Leon’s production of Much Ado About Nothing gave me the concrete words to say this:
A group in power can never tell the stories of those that they oppress and overlook.
We need representation because we need to hear those stories. We need people of color, and women, and LGBT folks, and people from the disabled community, and poor people—we need them telling their own stories. They are the only ones who can.
I could not have directed this version of Much Ado. I am white. I could not tell this story. Not because I was unwilling, or because I am a bad person. Because, despite my desire to be inclusive, I could not see that story. It was too obscured by my own.
But Leon could tell the story. And I could learn from it. And that is a blessing.
And it is a blessing that I, for one, think we need more of.
