[This article appears in the July/August 2022 issue of Boston Spirit magazine. Subscribe for free today.]
“Much Ado About Nothing” is one of Shakespeare’s most popular and frequently performed plays. But it’s a fresh spin on “Much Ado” that Commonwealth Shakespeare Company (CSC) brings to the Boston Common this July 20–August 7, with sparring couple Benedick and Beatrice played by Tia James and Rachael Warren, respectively.
Making her CSC directing debut is Megan Sandberg-Zakian who says she connects with “a queer ‘Much Ado’” for several reasons.
“I am married to a woman; one of the age-old dramaturgical questions about the play is, why do Beatrice and Benedick have such a difficult time admitting their feelings for one another?” she says. “Thinking about my journey, even coming out to myself, I thought [this casting] helps to explain it. It gives some texture to my understanding of why it’s so difficult for them to admit their feelings. So, for me, it’s a really exciting way of thinking about the text.”
“Much Ado” is about two couples: witty Beatrice and Benedick publicly proclaim their disdain for each other but fall madly in love while naïve Hero and Claudio fall quickly in love only to be thwarted and then reunited (in both cases, with a bit of help from their friends). The play is a comedy entangled in tragedy that tackles serious themes such as trust and betrayal, power and privilege, and gendered expectations around chastity and violence.
The free performances take place July 20–August 7 at the Parkman Bandstand on the Boston Common.
Sandberg-Zakian, who lives with her wife, psychologist Dr. Candice Crawford-Zakian, in Jamaica Plain, is known mostly as a director of new plays. A Seattle native, Sandberg-Zakian came to Boston by way of Providence, Rhode Island and Brown University after she was awarded a grant to work with artistic director Debra Wise at Underground Railway Theater in Cambridge. Sandberg-Zakian directed Danai Gurira’s “The Convert” for Underground Railway in 2016. The production earned numerous honors including the Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Production by a Midsize Theater.
More recently, she directed local favorite Maurice Emmanuel Parent in “Mr. Parent” at the Lyric Stage and MJ Halberstadt’s audio play “The Usual Unusual,” about the struggles of a queer bookstore in Boston, for Speakeasy Stage.
“The career I’ve had has taught me to approach everything as a new play — being curious about it, looking at the intention of the text, how to connect to it most truthfully and authentically and bring it into the world,” says Sandberg-Zakian. “That new play sensibility affects all processes regardless of how old the play is.”
But novel approaches to the canon are essential for deeper understanding and broader engagement, she says. “The only way to continue to see what these texts can reveal is to open them up wider and wider. There’s no point in doing plays that don’t feel like they still reveal something about our experience. Our experience is large; there’s a lot contained in it. ‘Much Ado’ feels like it has a lot to tell us about things that feel close to me.”
Sandberg-Zakian has felt close to theater from childhood, when she accompanied her father, a director and playwright, to rehearsals. “I was very excited by live storytelling; one of my childhood memories is of sitting on the floor of the living room and making cut-out paper dolls of the characters in his shows. So I was directing from a young age.”
But thanks to her mother, a molecular biologist, there was also science.
“I credit my parents for an eclectic, passionate household,” says Sandberg-Zakian. “I was an athlete; I was engaged with a lot of different things. I’ve always been a natural educator. I started in youth theater at the 52nd Street Project in New York City, which melded my interests in education and new plays, but with nine-year-olds.”
Essential questions about “the role of optimism and hope in art-making,” the subject of many late-night conversations, she says, led to her book, “There Must Be Happy Endings: On a Theater of Optimism and Honesty” from the 3rd Thing Press. Writing the book, Sandberg-Zakian says, provided her with a new perspective on difficult subjects in storytelling, including those in “Much Ado About Nothing.”
“It is certainly a comedy but it has some dark, difficult stuff,” such as the betrayal of Hero, the violent way she’s treated by Claudio and rejection by her father, she says.
“One of my lessons from the book is that I used to be a bit fearful of dark, devastating stories. But an authentic encounter with really difficult material has increased my capacity to feel joy and made things more expansive. Shakespeare knew that,” says Sandberg-Zakian. “One of the reasons the play lands with so much heart is because we go to a dark place in the middle of it. Productions willing to treat that with sincerity, to have characters be deeply affected, opens up more possibility for joy and delight and celebration and redemption.” [x]
More: commshakes.org
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