Imagine, if you will, a lush estate, covered with roses. This wealthy community has been missing its young men, who have been off at war for some time. But now the soldiers are back for some needed R&R. The atmosphere, predictably, is celebratory. This is how Much Ado about Nothing begins.

Except. War changes those who fight in it. That fact is glossed over by many directors of Shakespeare’s beloved comedy, who focus primarily on the fizzy banter between two lovers, Beatrice and Benedick. Director Lileana Blain-Cruz, however, is exploring a different vein of the text: These combatants have been changed, damaged by what they’ve seen and done and by what has been done to them. The spell of the war, she feels, will deepen Shakespeare’s comedy, enrich it with new colors.  

In a recent interview at OSF, Blain-Cruz talked about her vision of the play.

“Even though we’re not specifically referencing a particular war that America has been in,” she says, “the production is essentially referencing those kinds of wars: secret ops missions, missions in faraway places. These soldiers have been in battle; it’s been tough on their bodies, and there have been real casualties. A lot of what they’ve been through has been kept secret. What we’re watching is the tension between what they’ve come from and this beautiful landscape.”

Entering the idyll of Messina—the governor Leonato’s estate—is a reprieve from that war for military leader Don Pedro and his soldiers. “When you have this influx of soldiers, this male energy,” Blain-Cruz says, “it’s electric immediately for the women and the men. In our first rehearsal, the women gravitated to one side and the men gravitated to the other side and they just watched each other. It became like a high school ball, and that kinetic energy was really exciting.”

Of lovers and subterfuge

The play centers around two couples. The older one, Leonato’s niece, Beatrice, and the soldier Benedick, had a relationship in the past that ended badly. Brought together again, they communicate through a barrage of witty arrows and have to be tricked into resurrecting their tamped-down love for each other.

“Benedick is part of a group of compatriots, people he’s fought with, people he’s risked his life for,” the director says. “I don’t want to give too much away, but when we get to the moment when he gets put to the test about what his love for Beatrice means, he has a lot to risk. And Beatrice also has a lot to risk in confessing what her love is. They have to risk their whole sense of self to get to that place of love.”

Another approach that sets apart Blain-Cruz’s production is that she considers the younger couple in the play equally important. Hero, Leonato’s sheltered daughter, and Claudio, one of the soldiers, are novices at love and hobbled by the need to conform to public expectations of them.

“Hero is supposed to be regal, calm, obedient—and silent,” Blain-Cruz says. “How does she wrestle with that? And Claudio has to live up to toughness as the ideal of manhood.” The two have to go through the fire of treachery and lose each other before they can truly come together as adults.

That treachery is brought about through the machinations of Don John, Don Pedro’s bastard sibling, usually played by a male actor, here by a female. In the text, Don John is brooding and malevolent because he’s a bastard. This production gives the character an additional set of reasons for behaving badly: Don John has been severely injured in the war and now uses a wheelchair (as does the actor, Regan Linton).

“The wheelchair made that feel all the more real, made the stakes much higher because there was actual physical damage caused by that war,” Blain-Cruz says. “One of the reasons we hired an actor who uses a wheelchair is because she has a unique perspective of how complicated it is to live in the world in that way. What does it mean to not be able to participate in the same way as those around you? And so her having to reconcile with that—as an outsider, not only within the military but now within the world in general—it was really exciting for us to get at the layered complexities of her place in the world as Don John.”

Blain-Cruz, who received her MFA from Yale School of Drama in 2011, has spent her rising career as a director boldly exploring the ways race, sex and class inform the classics. “The ideas of gender and society and language are both really powerful and fallible, and something to be both trusted and mistrusted, is what we’re continuing to investigate in a deeper way.”

Still, despite the play’s more somber edges, it is nonetheless a comedy, with a fairly happy ending. “We watch people’s frailties and insecurities and jealousy explode,” she says. “You know, this could have been Romeo and Juliet. This could have ended in something terrible, and the fact that it doesn’t is where we’re saved, and I think we’re in part saved by the love that’s real between Beatrice and Benedick.”

For more information about Much Ado about Nothing, click here.