Much Ado About Nothing -- Ashland Oregon Shakespeare, 2024

  The Ashland Much Ado About Nothing was a typically lavish, extravagant celebration on the Elizabethan (outdoor) stage. 

Its most notable twist was a number of original songs, with trio accompaniment, woven through the drama. That maintained the spirit of comedy however tragic the Claudio-Hero subplot shadows the drama. One repeated motif left the entire drama feeling like a dance. 

The most significant lyrical addition was the last. Where Shakespeare leaves the resurrected Hero speechless after her wedding to the remorseful Claudio, here she stands apart from the general festivity and sings a modern assertion of a woman’s independence. She can forgive Claudio for his public humiliation and rejection of her, she sings, but can she ever live with him?  

We’re left with that open ending, which is more contemporary in consciousness than Shakespeare’s patriarchal culture might have allowed. 

Or was that open ending his intention in not giving Hero a verbal response to her unfaithful lover’s distrust and apology? Thus the more modern ending is not incompatible with the bard’s but a fair extrapolation..

Amy Kim Waschke’s Beatrice is exuberantly comic. Jordan Barbour plays Benedick straighter, except for the same farcical extremity they both indulge in their respective, deceptive eavesdropping scenes. 

        However extreme the production’s farce, however, it only serves to heighten the dramatic force of the newly discovered lovers’ bonding scene, Beatrice’s command: “Kill Claudio.” And of course the tragic shadow of Hero’s ostensible death and resurrection.

The title declares the play’s rich focus on nothing, but also noting (declaring and especially eavesdropping) and no-thing, i.e. emasculation. The latter includes Claudio’s by his “ocular proof” of Hero’s sexual experience, Benedick’s by Beatrice’s superior wordplay, which bests him every time, and — in a comic replay of the central characters’ themes — Dogberry’s self-exposure by his pompous malapropisms. 

Paradoxically, Claudio’s over-articulate rejection of Hero and Beatrice’s relentless wit prove the characters’ undoing — or at least the obstruction of their self-discovery and happiness. But the heroes are saved and the villains exposed by the bumbling watch, especially the play’s outrageously incompetent speaker, Dogberry. Language here proves a false agency.

By the way, amidst the significance of the characters’ names, while Beatrice means provider of blessings and Benedick the blessed, the deflationary Dogberry connotes the berry of a dog, i.e., a turd. He embodies the bathos of a presumptuous language.

Oddly, Much Ado bears a striking similarity to Othello. Both feature a heroine of non-feminine assertiveness, the “fair warrior” Desdemona and the whip-smart Beatrice. Both involve a woman’s destruction through a convincing, false report. Remember, that “ocular proof” is what Othello demands — and Iago rigs to provide. The villainous Don John here shares Iago’s “motiveless malignity,” i.e., an evil that goes far beyond any given motive or explanation, and also the undetermined promise of a severe, perhaps unimaginable, punishment. Even beyond the Hero subplot, this comedy early approaches the territory of the tragic. 

Coriolanus: Ashland Oregon Shakespeare 2024

  After last year’s financial challenges it’s great to see the Ashland Shakespeare Festival back — and in first-rate form.     

        The rarely produced Coriolanus is a coproduction with the feminist Upstart Crow Collective and Play on Shakespeare. The latter provided a modern verse translation by Sean San Jose, which proved a quite acceptable stand-in for a Shakespeare text that for once conveys more energy than poetry.

        The former shrank the cast to eight woman/nonbinary performers who seamlessly explored the tragedy of a war hero both nurtured and destroyed by his mother’s living her warrior dream through him. Any fear that the violent text would be diminished by the casting quirk was immediately dispelled by the excellent performers and the poetic infusion of ritualized dance and war-choreography.

The gender casting actually serves the plot. Though Coriolanus is obviously the given tragic hero, a case could also be made to qualify his mother. Volumnia’s tragedy is that she was a woman denied the opportunity to become the heroic, suffering soldier she craved to be. So she fashioned her son into her sunken heartless warrior. That selfishness also leads her to coax him into his own eventual death. Casting women as every Everymen allowed the performers the liberty she craved. They’ve come a long way, baby.

In the event the gender issue didn’t really  arise. The characters registered as people. Jessika Williams was a powerful, strident Coriolanus, as “manly” as imaginable. The other performers provided a full range off civilian characters, gender irrelevant. 

The rarely-produced play immediately speaks to our present politic. The heroic warrior disdains of the common people and declares his purity in an unwillingness to pay any respect to them. Director Rosa Joshi emphasizes the matching corruption of the elected tribunes by a telling addition to the text. Having doled out miniscule portions of corn to the starving, raging populace, the tribunes steal the bulk of the bag for themselves. In this clash between the unwavering militant and the gullible civilians there is little absolute virtue.

The gender casting serves another theme as well, the implicit homoeroticism between the two central warriors. At times Coriolanus’s clash with Aufidius segues into the promise of love-making. War turns out to be yet another arena for obsessive dedication to another person — as well as to a cause or a nation. 

In a brilliant casting, one actor portrayed both Coriolanus’s wife Virgilia and his fatal antagonist Aufidius. (On our night, because of an injury the understudy Ava Bingo played both roles -- brilliantly!) This Coriolanus shows a less erotic connection to his wife than to his enemy soldier. That is the twisted essence of the warrior, a hatred intense enough to turn erotic.So, too,  Volumnia’s exulting in her son’s bloody success often turns sexual. 

Aptly, this intensely psychological politic was performed in the small black box theatre, feeding the intimacy. 

Not knowing the play, I was struck by its echoes of Antony and Cleopatra, which Shakespeare wrote at around the same time. In both a great Roman warrior is destroyed by an intense relationship with a woman. Antony is of course defined by his passion for the Egyptian queen, Coriolanus by his submission to his mother, first by her thrusting him into the suffering of war, then by her compelling him into a fatal peace. Both soldiers are ultimately doomed by softness. The play defined by love has a poetry missing from this more violent one.  But this production was an equally compelling experience in its own range.