Much Ado About Nothing

Production Team

Notes on Much Ado About Nothing

by Katie Flemming, Dramaturg

There are rare moments in history when eras are marked by major shifts in social and political thought, when anything seems possible and our direction is uncertain. Director Maureen Shea described these times as “rifts in the universe” when articulating her decision to set this production of Much Ado About Nothing in a more modern “rift”: the United States 1966.

Shakespeare’s comedy follows three main plotlines with themes of wit, loyalty, and humility. Shakespeare weaves together these three narratives in a fast paced sharp comedy about the chaos that ensues when we allow our understanding of each other to be conditioned by the framing of others. We follow two couples, Claudio and Hero who have an innocent love at first sight but are broken apart by slander, as well as Beatrice and Benedick who have a history but are divided by their biting wits. Meanwhile Dogberry’s team of clownish law enforcement is trying to keep the peace and bring frauds to justice. The audience is left with the rumblings of a society in transition and the fragility of influence on our human egos.

Shea is setting Shakespeare’s comedy in the mid-sixties, at a time when skepticism and mistrust were bubbling under the surface of the 1950s ideals that many were still clinging to. Re-conceiving Shakespeare’s characters as the students and faculty of a slightly conservative liberal arts college in New England, she has created a forum in which the conflicts present in Shakespeare’s text lead to an exploration of similar shifts in American culture.

In 1966 new developments divided the country while the social and political fallout from the 1950’s was still fresh. The generation gap has never been wider than it was in the mid-Sixties due to the aftermath of the Cold War and the assassination of JFK, as well as our increased involvement in Vietnam. In these short years our nation evolved from the post WWII conservativism of “American Band Stand” and “Leave It To Beaver” to Dylan, beat poetry, a growing feminist movement, and a fiercely public civil rights movement.

Shakespeare’s characters in Much Ado About Nothing are on the brink of something; the brink of love, of death, of truth, of maturity, of changing perceptions of the world. Shea and company revitalize Shakespeare's witty romance and classic themes of deception and counterfeit in a new light as they use this text as a lens to explore changing attitudes toward gender, sexuality, politics, and authority in the mid-sixties. View a full synopsis.

JUDITH NIES has worked as a journalist, teacher, historian, secretary, researcher and speechwriter. Her third book, The Girl I Left Behind: A Narrative History of the 1960s combines memoir with cultural history and reframes the story of the Sixties from a woman’s point of view. Described as a chronicler of “lost history,” she is also the author of the classic Nine Women: Portraits from the American Radical Tradition, first published in 1977 as Seven Women and continuously in print; and Native American History, winner of the Phi Alpha Theta Award in history, a chronology of Native American history in the context of world events. She has always been interested in both academic history and history as it is presented in popular culture – in the movies, on television, in plays and in magazines. Her articles and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Ms., Harvard Review, Women’s Review of Books and other publications. She currently teaches writing at Massachusetts College of Art and is a member of PEN America. In teaching memoir, she says she looks for the “double consciousness” of a writer who understands how personal narrative tells a larger story. Her essay“The Black Mesa Syndrome” was a finalist for the John Oaks Award in Distinguished Environmental Journalism and was selected by editor Barry Lopez for inclusion in the anthology The Future of Nature (Milkweed, 2008). Awards include a Bunting Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and residency fellowships at the MacDowell and Yaddo artists colonies and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio center. She received her bachelor’s degree in history from Tufts University and a graduate degree in international studies from Johns Hopkins. A Massachusetts native, she grew up in Swampscott, has traveled widely outside the United States, and has lived in Cambridge, MA since 1981. She has one daughter who is an opera singer.