A new Ado PC makes something out of Nothing BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	Much Ado About Nothing By William Shakespeare. Directed by Mary G. Farrell. With Conor Tansey, Betsey Jensen, Elizabeth Larsen-Silva, Dan Janiero, Kerry McCormack, Jeffrey Dujardin, Katie Cheely, and Peter Waugh. At Providence College Blackfriars Theatre through November 9.

Much Ado About Nothing samples the full gamut of love’s potential, from anxiety to vertigo. It talks about bliss and pedestal-placing, while not neglecting betrayal and miscommunication. You could graduate from this play with a master’s in romance languages.

In staging it, Providence College’s Blackfriars Theatre is taking full advantage of the youthful exuberance that Shakespeare put on tap. Director Mary G. Farrell ringmasters this like an all-night kegger, but one that combines a posh eating club fete with a Fellini film wrap party. The set design by Jeremy Woodward puts us outdoors on the Sicilian coast, beach sand fore, colorful cabanas aft, on deck a frolicsome assortment of Eurotrash fixing to unwind in style. We even get a rap song, as the eye-rolling-to-modern-audiences "Hey Nonny Nonny" is updated with puckish flair.

Shakespeare’s governor of Messina, Leonato, here is prominent socialite Leonata (Kerry McCormack). The war that her guests are returning from was a corporate one. The victorious Don Pedro (Jeffrey Dujardin) is now CEO of Aragon Corp. His defeated but still-plotting brother Don John (Jason O. Davis), whom he has forgiven for battling against him, now is a bastard presumably only in the colloquial sense.

Much Ado’s two pairs of lovers wouldn’t care if the setting were West Side New York and the war had been between the Sharks and the Jets. Young executive Claudio (Conor Tansey) wants to marry Hero (Betsey Jensen), Leonata’s daughter. Shakespeare gives the plot a feeble conflict early on, having Don Pedro pretend to woo Hero in Claudio’s name, whereupon Don John pretends to think, and makes Claudio believe, that Don Pedro is after her for himself. Of course, that dispute is quickly resolved as a misunderstanding, and — to the Bard’s credit — we have thereby glimpsed what a hothead Claudio can be and have filed the information away for later reference.

That sort of character development is what Shakespeare was after in Much Ado, one of his last comedies. He even forgoes the elevated cadences of iambic pentameter for conversational prose rhythms, to help us identify with the ordinariness of the behavior on display. The masquerading-as-someone-else plot ruse, which he and groundlings loved so much, here isn’t a major element, mainly a device at a masked dance for further confusion-sowing. (Besides, he gives Beatrice enough take-charge attitude to not need men’s clothes to establish her commanding personality.)

So the real enjoyment comes through a chararacter-reliant subplot, a sort of mini-The Taming of the Shrew. Claudio’s friend Benedick (Dan Janiero) would rather die a bachelor than suffer the miseries of marriage, between the literal nagging and the nagging prospect of cuckoldry. Hero’s cousin Beatrice (Elizabeth Larsen-Silva) is the fever-dream of what he fears, a sharp-tongued wit who can skewer his insecurities like so much shish kebab. Friends arrange for each of them to overhear gossip about how each has unknowingly smitten the other one with their charms. Of course, both fall for that in a heartbeat, eagerly falling in love with someone who has the good sense to love them first.

Against all that good-natured romantic folderol, the playwright in his dramatic and cosmopolitan maturity adds a dark note, for grounding contrast. Don John lets his underling Borachio (Peter Waugh) have his lover, Hero’s servant, dress in Hero’s clothing for a tryst, so that Claudio can witness a supposed infidelity. The scheme succeeds. Claudio accuses her the next morning at their marriage ceremony, deaf to protestations of innocence. The old feigning death trick, which didn’t work out so well in Romeo and Juliet, pulls that chestnut out of the fire, since this is a comedy, and all’s well that ends well.

The poignancy and unsettling implications of that near-tragedy is tough to get across even in professional productions. But this cast conveys the overall story quite entertainingly and some of the characterizations with dash and substance. The tricky and crucial roles of Hero and Don John, sort of tonal bookends, are pulled off nicely with Larsen-Silva’s confident humor and Davis’s fine-tuned brooding. Smart direction makes other characters succeed through helpful ensemble work and clever casting. For example, the foolish constable Dogberry is funnier for being a petite young woman, Katie Cheely, surrounded by recruited deputies who, we see by their clothing, include a maid and a housewife. The company as a whole gets it together in the several madcap throng or party scenes as well, again aided by savvy staging, such as having the music fade when couples are spotlighted in the masked scene, their conversations popping out of a welter and of a piece with the resulting confusions.

Blackfriars Theatre has done well by this comedy classic, making plenty enough ado to keep us laughing.