Review of Periodicals 70.1

Shakespeare and Zoom Dramaturgy

Elizabeth Falter and Sarah Neville offer a fascinating account of a student production of Much Ado about Nothing that was interrupted by Covid and then adapted for Zoom. Their “Lord Denney’s Players” at Ohio State University had already chosen to emphasize a theme of “universal surveillance” for their spring 2020 production, in which “Who is watching, and do the performers know they are being watched?,” was a central question. When Covid forced the student actors on line, they proceeded brilliantly to make use of Zoom and other social media technology – at which (the authors wryly note) they were much more adept than their teachers – in order to emphasize the surveillance theme. Their ultimate on-line production, in which all performers Zoomed in from different places, yielded a Messina where “all human interaction is mediated by viewing technologies and social media.” The spying Benedick hid himself from Don Pedro, Claudio, and Leonato by partially removing himself from the screen, the disguised dancers at the party used filters for masks, and Dogberry and the Watch “muted” the prisoner Conrade when his protests became annoying. The Zoomed play, directed by undergraduate Hannah Woods, accentuated the ways in which its characters’ behavior is conditioned and sometimes constricted by their awareness of themselves as performers: Beatrice and Benedick as witty jesters, Benedick’s friends as proponents of an invented tale about Beatrice’s love for him, Don John as conveyor of a lie about Hero’s faithfulness. This universal play-acting, this…