Playing Love in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing

CHRISTIAN RONALD: What excites you most about working on Shakespeare’s plays?

ANYA SAFFIR: Well, if we start with the more or less uncontroversial statement—that Shakespeare was the greatest poet to have lived—perhaps that then leads to the question: why stage a poetic text for an audience? Why is that exciting? Robert Frost once said that poetry is a “momentary stay against confusion.” In my own life poetry provides a way to make connections and provide illuminations where before there was only darkness or confusion. Or, as Joseph Campbell says, there is a plane of the Seen (dishwashers, street signs, etc.) and a plane of the Unseen (honor, God, love, etc.), and though we can never see the Unseen, it makes up the important part of life—the part of life that makes life worthwhile. But since the Unseen plane is invisible, and since life sometimes feels confusing and random, we sometimes lose sight of the Unseen plane. Campbell says that some things have the capacity to make us sense its presence, and to these things we are attracted. They make us feel clearer, or less lonely, or pulled into the mystery of existence in a way that feels larger than ourselves. What are the things that allow for this experience? For me: poems and myths. And Shakespeare is our greatest poet and mythmaker.

CR: What drew you to Much Ado About Nothing in particular?

AS: It depicts the triumph of love, faith, and sincerity over fear, distrust, and cynicism in a way that is funny and unexpectedly moving. Interestingly, the fear and hate in this particular play is not the kind that occupies most of Shakespeare’s plays—war and murder, usurpation, dismemberment, and so forth. Rather, much of it is the stuff (the “nothing,” if you will) of our own everyday lives. The play asks us: Why is it so hard for us to give ourselves over to love? Why is it so hard to trust a person we love? Why do we build elaborate, ironclad fortresses around our hearts? Why is it we would sooner choose to be lonely than risk being truly seen by another person? Why do irony, sarcasm, and cynicism sometimes feel so comforting and protecting, and why is it so embarrassing to be sincere? How can we learn to endure the mortifications of love so that we can claim the rewards of it? These somewhat unsung difficulties of being alive are poignant to me.

CR: Can you describe how you collaborate with composer Cormac Bluestone in your work?

AS: I’m very lucky because about ten years ago I found a composer to work with who is not only capable of composing beautiful music but who is, in his bones, a storyteller and a theater animal. Cormac and I start by talking about the story. We talk about the story a great deal. Slowly out of these talks a vocabulary eventually emerges that describes the essential nature of the journey we want to take the audience on and what role the music plays in this journey. We also love to work with actors, and we often keep the music-making in the cast. I’d say that we like to prepare fairly meticulously so that when we’re in the room with the actors we can incorporate their ideas and make changes improvisationally because we have a structure pinning the big picture together.

CR: What inspires you to use live music in your productions?

AS: In the case of Much Ado About Nothing music is not only literally played by Balthazar and some hired musicians, it is also frequently talked about by the characters. For example Benedick, the great love-cynic who begins the play lamenting that his friend Claudio has fallen in love, says, “I have known when there was no music with him but the drum and the fife; and now had he rather hear the tabor and the pipe.” He scoffs at what others regard as the romantic transcendence of music when he says, “Is it not strange that sheep’s guts could hail souls out of men’s bodies?” Later, when he himself has fallen in love, Benedick attempts to compose a love song, enduring the embarrassment of that process. In the end, his pride and guardedness now mostly fallen away, Benedick asks the musicians to play as a celebration of love, and indeed “Strike up, pipers!” is the final line of the play. In Renaissance England it was thought that music could be heard purely only in the uncorrupted super-lunary sphere, the land of fixed stars and pure spirit above the moon. This was the realm of music, and of love. In Much Ado About Nothing, wit and prose are soon replaced by love and by music.

For me, the thrill and immediacy of live music is intrinsically bound up in the value of the present moment in live theater. It’s a marvelous thing to be in the audience and to experience a moment of collective awe or wonder, or fear—to feel everyone’s unconscious life stirred simultaneously by a sound or a word created in front of you. And as an audience member I love to watch the music created in front of me—by living actors and musicians—in open acknowledgement that this is theater, and you are the audience. We are all here, together, and I am playing for you. Recorded music, on the other hand, reinforces the feeling of a fourth wall: we are hearing music but not really acknowledging it. Its source is hidden. Recorded music was created by a human being at some previous time, in some other room. It distances, as the fourth wall distances. Also, since Shakespeare’s plays were written for live music to be played, it brings you deeper into the world of the play and not further away. You’re moving with the sense of his writing, and not cutting against it.

CR: You have a history of using strong ensemble work to create your productions—what in particular about Shakespeare lends itself to this type of collaboration?

AS: Shakespeare wrote plays in which fourteen actors had to evoke an entire English army, or a ship full of sailors in a storm, or a ball teeming with a hundred guests and musicians and servants. It is amazing to read certain scenes and think: “HOW are we going to do this with so few actors?” and then you begin to see the matrix of it and you realize, my goodness…it can be done. It will work. It was written to be this way. Part of the pleasure of a good Shakespeare production for the audience can be seeing the mechanics of this accomplished very plainly (for example, double casting, or actors playing music when they’re not in a scene) while at the same time believing in the fiction of the story because of the commitment of the actors and their ability to work together in harmony. This is ensemble work defined. And for me, theater is always ideally about community. The process of rehearsing is about locating a source of interest, or love, or even worship in the play that the actors can engage in with me as we rehearse and dig into the text. If the process is a deep and increasingly personal search for each member of the ensemble, this can create very strong bonds to one another and to the play. These bonds create a strong sense of mutual purpose in performing the play and can provide the bass notes of a production.

CR: If you had the opportunity to clear up any general misconception about Shakespeare for audiences today, what would it be?

AS: That the plays are elite. That you have to be educated and versed in Shakespeare to enjoy them or derive meaning from them or find them fun. Also, one commonly hears that the bawdy humor was written for the groundlings—the low-income audience members. I think that’s silly and slightly offensive. Are we to believe that Shakespeare was Queen Elizabeth’s favorite playwright despite the bawdy humor? That the groundlings went to get a snack every time the writing took a turn to the philosophical? Shakespeare is a populist writer. He appeals to every part of us—all the multitudes that we each contain: the part of us that reaches for something higher, the part of us that is naughty, subversive, wicked, delicate, rough, mystical, earthy, holy, nihilist. We contain these multitudes, and the diverse poetry in the plays is a reflection of this.

Christian Ronald is a second-year dramaturgy student in the A.R.T./Moscow Art Theater School Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University.