The play is set in Messina and revolves around two romantic pairings that emerge when a group of soldiers return victorious from war. The first pair of lovers, Claudio and Hero, is nearly destroyed by the accusations of the villain, Don John. The second romance, Benedick (Claudio’s friend) and Beatrice (Hero’s cousin), takes center stage as the play goes on, with both characters' wit and banter providing much of the humor, as neither one of them is mature enough to admit they have feelings for the other one.
Gossip! Lies! Jealousy! Sabotage! Overreacting and saying things that you’ll later regret! This play is so very, VERY relatable to anyone of any age, but ESPECIALLY to high school students.
While choosing to set a Shakespeare play in a time other than Elizabethan England is not new in the theatre world, as a director and as a teacher, I only choose to do this when it is going to empower the cast and creative team by enriching our creative possibilities and providing a "backdrop" through which we can examine societal issues that resonate from Shakespeare's time and into the present.
For this production, I chose to set this play in the 1940's, specifically beginning May 8th, 1945, on Victory in Europe Day, which marked the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany to the Allies in World War II. Now, please know that any sort of adaptation of Shakespeare into a more "modern" setting does not always literally translate as "Character A is now Eisenhower," or anything like that. Our story begins with the soldiers coming home victorious from war - in this case the Allied Forces being Don Pedro and his compatriots.
It should be noted that while the Hollywood High School Theatre Department follows the current industry practices of color conscious casting, it would of course have been highly unlikely for soldiers different racial backgrounds to serve alongside each other in the same unit (the exceptions of this being Chinese-American and Latino-American soldiers, who were sometimes integrated into other units). In fact, in World War II, there were various units of BIPOC Americans who served honorably and with distinction: the 14th Air Force Chinese American Composite Wing, the 442nd Infantry Regiment, the Phillipine Scouts, the 92nd Infantry Division, the "Black Panther" Tank Battalion (761st), the Tuskegee Airmen, and many more.
There is much to celebrate about the America of the 1940s - it marked the end of the Great Depression, Americans (perhaps begrudingly) developed a tremendous spiritual resolve to defend democracy and freedom of other countries, saw the defeat of a rapacious Nazi Germany, saw hundreds of thousands of women demonstrate the courage, capability, and tenacity that should have never been in question (yet somehow was) as they filled in the jobs of the factories (as the men were drafted) and built the planes, bombs, ships, guns, and countless other necessities that led to the downfall of the Axis powers, and ushered in the modern age.
Yet the 1940's were also plagued by the racial discrimination that came before - segregation of Black Americans, the "internment" camps of Japanese Americans under suspicion of being Japanese spies purely because of their racial heritiage, the forced deportation of Mexican immigrants in the 1930s, the list goes on.
We must be able to acknowledge that viewing history with a simplistic narrative is tempting, and comforting: "This was definitely a good time, this was definitely a bad time," etc., but it is an irresponsible oversimplification to try and do so. The truth is often messy, complicated, ugly, and important to discuss with students as such. It is also only ever a moment in time (or perhaps several moments), that, like the threads of a tapestry, weave and weft together so intricately with what came before and what came after.
