Photo Credits: Courtesy of Lily Mueller ’26
Mary Grahn ’28
Staff Writer
For many, the name Shakespeare invokes a sense of dread, bringing to mind memories of high school English classes filled with stale interpretations of dense and unrelatable text. This fall, Talia Pott ’25 set out to challenge these preconceptions through her senior thesis project: a genderqueer reimagining of “Much Ado About Nothing,” which was performed Nov. 22 through Nov. 24 in Rooke Theatre.
Pott, who is getting licensed in theater education, approached the production with the goal to make early modern language and drama more accessible in theater and English class settings. Aiming to reshape how we think about Shakespeare, Pott crafted a production that challenges traditional gender roles. “We’re modernizing it … through the angle with which we are thinking about the topics,” Pott explained in an interview with Mount Holyoke News. Many of those themes, including how society treats women, feel very relevant today.
Pott’s production is set in Messina during the 1800s, a midpoint between the time period the play was originally set in and today. The play revolves around two romantic relationships: Hero and Claudio, played by Farah Hasan ’27 and Fiona Gillogly ’26, respectively, and Beatrice and Benedick, portrayed by Izzy Messina ’26 and Ace MacIntyre ’25, respectively. The relationship between Hero and Claudio initially follows a traditional courtship, but soon the scheming of Don John, played by Charlie Watts ’25, threatens to derail their romance when he frames Hero for infidelity.
As Pott notes, the play’s exploration of false accusations against women feels strikingly modern. “There's always been a history in this country specifically targeting and marginalizing women based off of accusations and sexualization, and especially recently that has really come into the foreground,” Pott explained. “The way that this play talks about that and handles it is remarkably modern despite the fact that it was written 400 years ago.”
In contrast to Hero and Claudio’s conventional romance, Beatrice and Benedick’s relationship is much less typical for the time period. Both characters are witty and frequently disparage each other humorously, creating a dynamic that challenges traditional gender roles. A main idea the production aims to highlight is the queerness present in their relationship.
“In [Beatrice] there’s this masculinity that comes through, and [in Benedick] there’s this femininity,” Pott said. “It really blends together to create this almost queer relationship in a really beautiful way.” The production tries to convey this queerness through various production aspects, from the acting choices to the costuming.
At the heart of “Much Ado About Nothing” lies the theme of love; not only romantic love, but the love between friends and family. Pott added that she “hope[s] for anyone who's currently feeling very depressed about the way that the world currently is” that the play gives them a “small sense of justice and resistance,” and that audiences see that “even in a very dark world, when we build community for each other, there is some light.”