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For those of a certain generation, the charming 1993 rom-com featuring actors Kenneth Branaugh, Emma Thompson and a scheming Keanu Reeves might first come to mind when one mentions Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing.”
The Actors Ensemble of Berkeley‘s rendition of the gossipy Shakespeare comedy at John Hinkel Park’s historic amphitheater instead delves deeper into the tragic moments of the play, exploring themes of redemption and forgiveness.
The nonprofit theater company, which has been performing in Berkeley for over 50 years, plans to take some creative liberties with Shakespeare’s work.
The original play takes place in the 16th century. Theirs is set in 2024, with performers carrying cellphones and iPads dressed in modern clothes. The gender roles of some major characters, including Beatrice and Benedick, have been swapped. Leonato, Hero’s father, has been rewritten as Leonora, her mother.
The character Hero, viewed by some as being a helpless victim of patriarchy, is cast in a different light by making her a modern woman and “giving her the power of forgiveness,” according to director Glenn Havlan, who co-adapted the script with Gaby Schneider.
Despite these changes, Havlan insists they have kept the spirit of what makes Shakespeare, well, Shakespeare.
While some festivals, including the renowned Oregon Shakespeare Festival, have in recent years tried to “translate” Shakespeare into contemporary English to make it easier to understand, Havlan, a devout Shakespeare fan who estimates that he has performed in and or directed 40 productions of 20 different Shakespeare plays, disagrees with the practice.
“Shakespeare invented modern English,” Havlan said. “To put it in a more modern colloquial form, it takes the power, the poetry, the music, the rhythm away from it.”
The two-hour-long shows, which start at 4 p.m. and take place on Saturday and Sunday afternoons from June 29 through July 14, are free to attend, though reservations are encouraged and donations are welcome. Hot dogs, veggie dogs and corn cobs will be available for purchase during intermission. There will be a bonus show on Thursday, July 4.
Havlan, a Pacifica resident who works as a facility manager for the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department during the 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 first get into theater?
I’ve done theater since I was in high school, even a little bit before that. I was also a guitar and bass player and concentrated on music for quite a while in my late teens and early twenties.
When I went back to college [at San Francisco State University], I just happened to notice that they were doing “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” So I auditioned, played the role of Oberon, and I got back into it. That was over 40 years ago.
Was that your introduction to Shakespeare?
Not at all. I didn’t get into Shakespeare because I was into theater. I got into theater because I was in Shakespeare. I had some friends who were similarly fascinated with Shakespeare and we read it, we did scenes from it, and that’s always been my primary 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 lighten up. It starts out ominous, and then it just gets worse and worse, and it just is relentless in its doom and gloom and ends up with everyone dying. The process of that play is methodically tragic.
*Would you say that “Much Ado About Nothing,” being a lighter comedy, is on the opposite end of that spectrum?
It is. It’s basically a dual love story. It’s an interesting play — it’s hard to say whether it’s about Hero and Claudio or whether it’s about Beatrice and Benedick. It’s about two couples on similar, but not really parallel, paths toward 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’re watching the Claudio-Hero courtship play out very carefully and seeing a lot of what they’re afraid of come true. But once they fix it, and once it’s done, then they can admit that it’s a good thing and that they should come together too.
It has moments, though, of absolute tragedy. The fiasco at the wedding and the way the characters react in that moment is absolutely tragic. I have a fascination with characters in Shakespeare comedies that don’t know they’re in a comedy. In that wedding scene where the mother — originally father, but we changed it — is appalled and shocked by what she thinks is her daughter’s behavior, she says some awful things and is destroyed. There’s nothing comic about it at all.
While there are serious moments in other Shakespeare comedies, I don’t know if there’s any point where a character gets as desperately tragic as Leonato, or in our case, Leonora.
*Why did you decide to swap the gender roles of Beatrice and Benedick?
To update it. There’s been 400 years of history since Shakespeare wrote these plays and there have been countless places and times where there was a really apt parallel to what was happening in the plays. Most of them are very adaptable to different times, different places. I once directed “The Merchant of Venice” in modern dress. There are a number of other plays that you can do this with, and that was our experiment — to see what is revealed in the play by setting it now and taking it out of doublet and hose and making it more recognizable on the surface.
Another thing you often hear is that Beatrice and Benedick are so similar and well-suited to each other because they’re basically the same person. Well, let’s try that out. What we’ve done is we have the character of Benedick being played by a woman, and we have the character of Beatrice being played by a man.
Benedick, in the original story, is a soldier and officer. Now, in 2024, we have women who are soldiers and officers, and so she is able to inhabit that world in ways she could not have 400 years ago. So much of the play is about what it means to be a man or a woman, so we’re examining what happens when we change it around.
Can you tell me more about your decision to turn Leonato, Hero’s father, into Leonora, her mother?
This was not just to make more roles for women, which is a very worthy goal. It was specifically to change the relationship between Leonato and Hero into a mother-daughter relationship to examine how much of the patriarchy that is very much in effect in this play is inherently male or inherently institutional, and how much of it is about the individuals that are in this drama.
Why does Shakespeare continue to remain relevant today?
Because they deal with the most basic human issues. It’s not every single one all the time — they cycle in and out. There have been some times when Shakespeare plays were verboten. Certainly, after World War II, you couldn’t touch “Merchant of Venice” for decades. And modern feminism of the ’60s and ’70s made “Taming of the Shrew” impossible to do for a very long time.
It’s not that we changed our attitudes that causes us to feel that these plays are not relevant. It’s that there are other things going on in the plays that caused us to realize that these are deeper than the current types of social concerns that they touched on in negative ways.
Characters in Shakespeare plays aren’t shallow people. They do stuff that is unexpected, they do things for no reason, they do things for reasons that anybody who’s ever been human for the last hundred thousand years can understand. They’re really real people and they’re really adaptable.
