- Carissa Dixon
- David Daniel, Colleen Madden, and Eric Parks in Much Ado About Nothing
American Players Theatre is a place of qualified pleasures, starting with the fact that a Chicagoan has to drive four hours through interstate hell to enjoy them. Located in Spring Green, Wisconsin, about an hour west of Madison, the 35-year-old, Shakespeare-centric company sits on a hill amid rolling farmland—but you’ve got to trek to the top of that hill to enter the main amphitheater. The amphitheater itself is surrounded by great old trees and open to the stars—but you’d better douse yourself with DEET before daring to spend an evening there. And don’t forget your umbrella, just in case.
All that really stands in the way of bliss for Benedick and Beatrice is their famous mouths, so often employed in debunking not only each other but the whole notion of marriage. Claudio and Hero, on the other hand, are victims of malign forces: Inasmuch as Don Pedro brought the pair together, the don’s “plain-dealing villain” of a bastard brother, Don John, sees it as his mission to pull them apart. He devises a plan to make everyone believe that Hero is a two-timing slut.
I’ve taken up so much space discussing Hero and Claudio that you might suppose they’re the core of the play. In fact, they’re the plot, which isn’t quite the same thing. Much Ado‘s actual, beating heart is the courtship of Beatrice and Benedick. It’s a Tracy-Hepburn sort of affair, and Colleen Madden and David Daniel do a great job of evoking its tense verbal thrills. More, they get at its occasionally harrowing dynamics, Madden’s Beatrice being much the sharper and crueler (even savage) of the two while Daniel’s Benedick comes off as a bit of an oaf despite his military prowess, attempting to use his comic wit to ingratiate himself with his comrades. Under David Frank’s emotionally nuanced direction, each of them arrives at a stark moment when the limitations of the social persona he or she has adopted become crushingly apparent.
