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Common Ground Makes Much Ado About Shakespeare

Lucy Gellman | December 5th, 2024

Common Ground Makes Much Ado About Shakespeare

Education & Youth  |  Elm Shakespeare Company  |  Arts & Culture  |  New Haven Schools  |  Common Ground  |  Arts & Anti-racism

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Top:  Greer Armstrong as Ursula and Rhiannon Anoh as Hero. Bottom: Alanna Herbert as Beatrice and Joshus Colon as Benedick. Lucy Gellman Photos.

Alanna Herbert stared straight at Joshua Colon, her eyes wide and fiery. “O, God, that I were a man!” she exclaimed, and her mouth twisted as if she had sucked on a lemon. The words roiled, red-hot beneath the surface. “I would eat his heart in the market place. Talk with a man at the window!” Suddenly the two were thousands of miles from New Haven, arguing in the heart of Messina. “A proper saying! Sweet Hero! She is wronged, she is slandered, she is undone.”

Her eyes gleamed; nothing was lost in translation. It felt like how Shakespeare was always meant to be performed, just four centuries after the fact.

Welcome to Common Ground High School’s Much Ado About Nothing, coming to the second annual Elm Shakespeare Company Youth Festival later this month. A collaboration between Elm Shakespeare and the environmentally-focused charter school, the play builds a bridge between the sixteenth century and the present, giving a master class in the power and fragility of belief.

In turn, many of the students have taken its lessons to heart, learning how the Bard can make them into kinder global citizens. The show, which ran for the school twice on Tuesday, will have an encore performance at Nagatuck Valley Community College on Dec. 14, during the festival. Tickets and more information are available here.

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Alexander Almanzar as Don Pedro, Isonnette O'Brien as Leonata and Taylor Wilmott as Claudio.

It marks the 15th year that Elm Shakespeare and Common Ground have collaborated, and the fifth that Common Ground has offered early college credit for two Shakespeare classes, “Foundations of Acting” and “Shakespeare Workshop,” through Elm and Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU).    

“We did the Scottish Play [Macbeth] last year, so I wanted to do a comedy,” said Sarah Bowles, director of education with Elm Shakespeare Company. “The group wanted to do a comedy that also had some drama. And this is so funny and so dramatic—it’s this beautiful mix. I think high schoolers really get it.”

Part of that lives within the work itself, which students helped choose at the beginning of the semester. Written on the lip of the seventeenth century, Much Ado unfolds in the Italian city of Messina, where Don Pedro (Alexander Almanzar) has returned from war with his friends Claudio (Taylor Wilmott) and Benedick (Joshua Colon). Around the city, the air is thick and sticky with gossip, including several characters who cannot seem to get enough of it.

Whispers fly: Beatrice’s friends plant the seed that Benedick is into her (a nod to Greer Armstrong as a sweet and witty Ursula), and Benedick’s friends do the same. At a masquerade ball, Claudio ultimately falls for Hero (Rhiannon Anoh) with Don Pedro as his wingman, while Hero’s cousin Beatrice (Alanna Herbert, was last year played Lady Macbeth) does a little hate flirting with Benedick, with whom she is comfortably frenemies. As she and Benedick develop feelings for each other—also the result of gossip—Claudio and Hero plan their wedding.

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But Don Pedro’s bastard brother Don John (Lillian Abarca) has other plans: he begins to spread the rumor that Hero is a loose woman, a piece of hot gossip that gets Claudio to leave her at the altar after verbally dragging her with some fierce Elizabethan descriptors. Shocked, Hero faints—and learns that Benedick is the only man to believe her when she comes to. So when her mother, Leonata (Isonnette O’Brien), suggests that she play dead to get back at Claudio, she does. After all, his words have cut to her core.

Meanwhile, subplots weave in and out of characters’ lives, all somehow tied to the Elizabethan-era spilling of tea and spread of disinformation. It is all peak Shakespeare, even in abridged and tightened form. What makes it relatable, of course, is what makes all Shakespeare relatable: shaming women and spreading lies are just as popular on TikTok as they were in the Renaissance. If proof be needed, looketh no further than the incoming presidential administration.

At Common Ground, the text has found the perfect audience in a group of young and dedicated thespians who are figuring out their emotions, falling in and out of friendships (and situationships), and talking about things like agency and consent. These students, with thousands of their peers across the city, are starting to ask hard, critical questions of the media and the narratives around them.

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Top: Greer Armstrong as Francis Feeble, Isonnette O'Brien as George Seacoal and Alexander Almanzar as Hugh Oatcake. Bottom: Glow Torres as Dogberry.

“I like the message in the play a lot,” said Colon, a senior at the school whose Benedick marks his first foray into Shakespeare. “I love acting and I love performing … I think it [the role] teaches me to be a better human being, a better man.”

“I see myself in Beatrice,” added Herbert, a senior who learned the role on short notice after another student left the show. “She’s kind of feministic, and I love the fact that she’s able to voice her opinions and not be afraid of alienating suitors. It’s about focusing on yourself.” 

Those lessons spring up everywhere in the finished work, from backstage antics to standout performances from Herbert and Colon. Before an afternoon show began Tuesday, Bowles and actors spread out on a length of floor-turned-stage, running a few scenes one last time before their classmates entered the gymnasium.

As she called for actors, Abarca came in hot, a half-costumed Borachio (Clouds Mutale) on her heels. In Shakespeare’s universe, Don John’s plan had been foiled, and he was none too pleased. But when Abarca started to speak, she was surprisingly demure for a villain, calm and collected instead of scheme-y and softly diabolical.   

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“Come in pissed off, Lillian!” Bowles directed as Abarca rewound a clock in her head, getting ready to run the entrance again. “Don’t rush it. You gotta spell it out for them. The audience doesn’t know the story. You all do, but they don’t.”

Abarca turned her eyes toward where the audience would soon sit and started again. This time, her voice was steady, with a cool edge that felt nearly musical. When she later announced that “I am a plain-dealing villain/I am trusted with a muzzle and enfranchised with a clog,” it sounded like she was dropping bars to a new cold blooded hit single.

Bowles kept the momentum going. Minutes later, cast members were running the masquerade ball, dancing over the synth-soaked instrumentals to Lil Jon’s “Get Low.” Feet fell gently on the floor, a courtly dance taking shape. Students box-stepped and twirled around their partners, feathered masks in hand. Fingers floated into the air and hovered overhead. Hero and Claudio conversed, and characters froze to illustrate the gravity of the moment.

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Just when it felt like a time capsule, the two came center stage to do the Funky Charleston, a move that later garnered outbursts of cheers and applause. They went on to run bows, then headed backstage as classmates and family members began to trickle in.

“Shakespeare is hard,” O’Brien said as chatter rose in the front of the house and she steadied her nerves. While she’s done musical theater for years, Much Ado marks her first time with the Bard. “It’s like learning a new language. I’ve never felt into it until now.”

The play has taught her that “mistakes are gonna happen, but if you keep pushing through, it’s gonna turn out great,” she added. 

Minutes later, those words came to life onstage, as students entered and the language rolled off their tongues. From the jump, they immersed themselves in this world, which was not their world, but not too far from it either. Around them, a minimal set transported viewers to Messina with two ivy-wrapped columns and small pedestals, each with a sculpture of cupid. A temporary forest-green wall separated them from backstage. Every so often, the electronic drone of a school bell reminded people where they were.

“All my people! These are all my people!” exclaimed Imani Gayle, delighted as she watched from the front row. Beside her, fellow student Ava Montavez held onto every word.

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Elm Shakespeare's Sarah Bowles, who shared that she loves the show because many of the characters are written way ahead of their time. 

And indeed, cast members shone as they gave the Bard an update that sounded like England circa 1599 but looked and felt a lot more like New Haven. As the play swung into action, characters made their introductions, some holding their chests as if the words were precious, rare. O’Brien and Almanzar jumped in with a secret handshake and audible thumps on the back. When Beatrice and Benedick entered exchanging barbs, it felt like they were off to the races.

“God keep your Ladyship still in that mind, so some gentle man or other shall ’scape a predestinate scratched face,” Colon-as-Benedick announced, and it was clear that he had already done the translation in his head half a dozen times, working out how best to deliver the insult.

“Scratching could not make it worse an ’twere such a face as yours were,” Herbert-as-Beatrice shot back, with enough sass and ease to demystify its stiff and labyrinthine contours. In the audience, a few students got the burn immediately—she’s saying he’s already so ugly that scratching his face up won’t make an ounce of difference—and let loose a few whoops from the stands.

The two became the heart of the show, folding in physical humor that had other characters following suit. Colon barrel rolled, army-crawled, and hid behind statues, and Wilmott and Almanzar hammed up the act of gossiping, making it fun and campy. Herbert hid under a blanket, and Armstrong’s Beatrice leaned all the way in, nearly sitting on her as an audible peep escaped from beside her arm.

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MuchAdoCGHS - 8When Anoh fainted and came to, she seemed to understand that a bomb had been dropped in the middle of the play, taking the time to let characters soak in the words. Wilmott, meanwhile, let herself step into the anger and chagrin that Claudio feels, channeling something that was at once 1599 and 2024. 

In the audience, students stilled and listened, some sitting wide-eyed as if their classmates were translating a soap opera for them in real time. When time froze in the middle of the masquerade ball, a few murmurs of surprise and delight rippled through the audience. When Beatrice asked Benedick to kill Claudio—bemoaning the social conventions that kept her from doing it herself—students seemed to be all ears. “Oooohhhh!” Montavez exclaimed in the front row.

That’s the magic of Shakespeare, of course: it stands the test of time when people understand it enough to have fun with it. When Hero protests and Benedick nods, it’s just another way of saying I believe you. When Beatrice announces that she does not wish to marry until men are made "of some other metal than earth,” the translation is that she’s putting herself first, because she doesn’t have time for the foolishness that is patriarchy. When Claudio apologizes—a moment that Wilmott called relatable—it’s an acknowledgement that humans err when they listen to gossip.

In the hugs and chatter with friends and family after the show, Wilmott and Almanzar savored the post-performance high—a feeling they hope to recreate in Waterbury next weekend. A senior at the school, Wilmott said the show helped her approach social media and mainstream news with a healthy dose of skepticism. Backstage, Almanzar called the experience exhilarating, with a text that keeps teaching long after bows have ended.

“It taught me how to collaborate with my friends,” he said, recalling how cast members would help each other with lines and work to pump each other up before a rehearsal or performance. “It was a great teamwork experience.”