Hero's Journey

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival's current production of Much Ado About Nothing makes it clear that the story's real hero is Hero herself.

Much Ado is two stories intertwined into one play: the "Merry War" between Beatrice and Benedick, and Hero's journey from the altar to the grave back to the altar. The Merry War is the perennial crowd pleaser, but Hero is the play's heart.

Much Ado begins with soldiers returning home to Messina, to be greeted by Beatrice (Christiana Clark) and Hero (Leah Anderson). Beatrice immediately starts laying into Benedick (Danforth Comins) before the latter even arrives, but Hero remains passive: laughing good naturedly at her cousin's antics, and allowing herself to be wooed by Don Pedro (Cristofer Jean) on behalf of Claudio (Carlo Albán). Her greatest moment of activity comes when she describes how madly in love with Beatrice Benedick is, while her cousin eaves drops. She loses her agency again when Claudio insults and refuses her at the altar, all on the strength of Don Jon's treachery, and his own fear of women. She's caught in the claws of the patriarchy: when she denies that she had sex with another man on the night before her wedding, her own father (Jack Willis) asks, "Would the two princes lie?" To escape, she has to feign death and then resurrect herself at the Friar's (Tyrone Wilson) suggestion. It's at the play's conclusion that she regains some semblance of autonomy: her public forgiveness of the men's transgressions is what allows the play to end.

The Merry War is Much Ado's entertaining selling point, especially when the belligerents have as much chemistry as Clark and Comins, but it's also the sugar that helps the proverbial medicine go down. Shakespeare apparently spent more time with Hero's journey than the Merry War, seeing as the former is written in verse and the latter prose. For the most part, the Merry War you see is the Merry War you get: Beatrice and Benedick pretend not to like each other, and flirtingly tease each other, but all it takes is a little nudge and they're plastering their own nuptials onto cousin Hero's wedding. The only place we get to see the substance of their rapport with each other is alliteratively not-funny "Kill Claudio." Phrased differently, Hero's journey shows us the substance behind the Merry War. On the other hand, Hero's arc closely parallels the most important story in Elizabethan culture: the death and resurrection of Jesus. Hero is innocent, but nonetheless forced into her grave by the faults of others. Her primary antagonist must confess his sins to her before she returns from the grave and, at least publicly, she forgives him and the other sinners. The differences between Shakespeare's story and the one(s) in the Bible are telling: in contrast to Jesus' masculinity, we have Hero's femininity. While Jews and Romans are responsible in the Bible for Jesus' crucifixion, it's men organized in a sexually immature patriarchy who are responsible for Hero's figurative interment. Hero's journey is a rather forward thinking critique of a society structured around male power and frailties, and constitutes the soul of Much Ado About Nothing. The Merry War's function is to pick up the mood from the troubling, and perhaps blasphemous, implications of Hero's Passion. Telling that story, though, calls for a strong actress: one who can tell a story to a rather cavernous house without saying it. Hero is a repressed female, who only says the sorts of things that her men want her to say. It's her hamartia, since it puts her in a position where living her life at their behest means alienation from them since, for the most part, they're stupid and viciously insecure. Leah Anderson is an actress who can tell that story, and director Lileana Blain-Cruz is a director who knows enough to give Hero's character the attention needed to allow Anderson to do her job. In Anderson and Blain-Cruz's hands, OSF's Much Ado is a compelling narrative about a woman Jesus, the gall of which is sweetened by the sugar of Clark and Comins' merry banter.

Hero is the oft overlooked hero of Much Ado About Nothing, but she's not at all overlooked by OSF. Leah Anderson and Lileana Blain-Cruz are the heroes of this particular production for giving her the weight the play needs her to have.