Preface

An excerpt from the printed version of MuchAdoDotCom.

The story of this play begins with William Shakespeare. Then it visits the realm of rap and hip-hop, traveling via the path pioneered by performance poets in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It pauses briefly in Glengarry Highlands and Glen Ross Farms, and then wends its way into a suburban office park. The presentation is spiked with folk music; a special sauce seasoned by Pete Seeger, Stan Rogers, and the Rankin Family. Grand theft literature is committed. A classic text is sampled. Dramatic warts are excised. Old stage devices are made new again. Audiences are invited to participate in the performance. 

Here’s the backstory.

In the early 1990s, I developed a fascination with Much Ado About Nothing. I’m not sure where my interest started; the most likely source was the Kenneth Branaugh film of Shakespeare’s play. Emma Thompson, Denzel Washington, Keanu Reeves, Michael Keaton—there’s a lot to like about that film. 

Much Ado has never been my favorite Shakespeare play; that place belongs to Twelfth Night. I never acted in or designed Twelfth Night, but one special performance led by Len Cariou as Feste at the old Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis is anchored in my personal Top 10 list of the finest stage performances I have experienced.

However, about 30 years ago, Much Ado About Nothing and I began our on-again, off-again relationship. Every time another version, on screen or on stage, came around, I wanted to see it. And afterward, I was still unsatisfied. 

No matter which theatre company or film director took on the challenge, I was disappointed. There might be a few great scenes or performances, and I enjoyed revisiting most of the story, but there were those warts. Don John, the villain of the piece—what is his problem? His actions always appeared completely arbitrary to me. The disappearance of Hero? She gets embarrassed, so she just vanishes from the stage for half the play? Then, an arranged marriage? Where is her agency? Shouldn’t she be allowed to think and speak for herself?

What about Dogberry and Verges? Are these guys actually funny? Seriously, I think that even Shakespeare’s audiences would have seen them as second-rate clowns.

I knew the play intimately and kept looking for that performance, that brilliant director, who would make the play as good as I thought it could be.

Performance Poetry

My musical taste over the years has tended toward the traditional: folk songs, dance tunes from England to Appalachia, and music performed primarily on acoustic instruments with low levels of amplification. I always wanted to grow up to be Pete Seeger, and I have, over the years, become a fairly competent leader of chorus songs. I love it when people sing together.

To be sure, I was immersed in pop music through the 1960s and ‘70s. I’m a fan of oldies from those decades and I attended concerts by the Dead, Janis Joplin, the Airplane, and Joe Cocker. As the arts critic for The Evansville Press in the mid-70s, I covered concerts by Bowie, Kiss, ZZ Top, and the Stones. With the end of the 1970s, however, my connection with popular music came to a complete halt. My knowledge of pop, rock, and R&B was laid to rest in 1980. I have only the vaguest knowledge of what was happening after that. Even now, my appreciation of performers like Bruce Springsteen or Lady Gaga is based on historical research: I didn’t follow them through the years.

Music or Poetry?

When a massive new music genre, hip-hop, hit the stage, I formed a vague impression of what it was about and passed it by. My real-time assessment of rap and hip-hop was very simple: it wasn’t music. The lead performers didn’t read music, they didn’t play instruments, they weren’t singing. Sure, a lot of people seemed to like it, but—in my mind—it wasn’t music. I classified it as performance poetry. 

The artists executed impressive feats of memorization, and they strutted and fretted their hours upon the stage with bravado and brilliant creative effect. They put on a great show. Music, though? Not so much. I wrote it off.

I thought of rap and hip-hop as a continuation of a line of performance poets that could be dated back to Homer. There were three 19th-century North American poets who I saw as pioneering artists in the genre.

James Whitcomb Riley, the Hoosier Poet, was one of the most popular entertainers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He began his career touring the Midwest in the 1880s and gained a reputation for his engaging performances and his ability to connect with audiences. His poems were often humorous and heartwarming. He commanded high fees for his performances and earned a significant income from the sale of his books. By the 1890s, Riley was one of the wealthiest writers in America.

Robert Service, the Canadian poet best known for his verses about the Yukon gold rush, began his career as a bank clerk in the Klondike. He had been dabbling in poetry since childhood. When locals in the Yukon prodded him to create some poems for them, he responded with The Shooting of Dan McGrew. He began performing his poems in local bars and saloons, and he quickly gained a following. Like Riley, he parlayed his performances into a good living as an entertainer. He also earned a significant income from his books. Service became one of the most popular poets in the world, traveling extensively, living for a time in France, and enjoying a wealthy lifestyle until his death in 1958.

And then, there was Vachel Lindsey. 

Nicholas Vachal Lindsay, born in 1879, died by his own hand in 1931. In his short life, he created a style of performance poetry that was written to be acted, chanted, sung, and accompanied by whoops and hollers. If a music scholar was searching for a grandfather for hip-hop (or perhaps a great uncle) Lindsay would be a candidate. 

My communion with Lindsay began in childhood. One of his poems was included in a volume of poetry, Silver Pennies, that my mother read to me from the time I was an infant. I learned it by heart and still can recite it. Later, I attended Hiram College, where Lindsay had been a student. He failed to graduate, but he left his mark on the school with a room named in his honor as an illustrious almost-alumnus.

Lindsay’s most famous poem—The Congo—will cause modern readers to cringe because of its racial stereotyping. With that said, Lindsay’s intentions were honorable. W.E.B. Dubois praised Lindsay’s story, The Golden-Faced People, for its insights into racism while criticizing the poet’s overall lack of understanding of the challenges African-Americans faced. Lindsay perceived himself as an anti-racist and claimed credit for “discovering” Langston Hughes, who, at the time, was working as a bus boy in Washington, D.C. Lindsay’s legacy, overall, must be said to be “mixed” but that in itself is, I think, a worthy accomplishment. He saw the reality around him and actually tried to do something to address it in his art.

Two stints of living in Indiana had given me a passing familiarity with Riley. The works of Robert Service had been favorites of my father. My time at Hiram acquainted me with Lindsay and his dramatic approach to poetry. I saw all of this as a kind of foundation for hip-hop and rap. But it was all background noise, not a front-of-mind interest.

A Confluence of Circumstances

It is only in retrospect, as I am writing this Preface, that I can see what happened between 2000 and 2013 that led to first iteration of MuchAdoDotCom.

In 2001, I got a job working in Information Technology. I had been hired as a Public Relations Specialist at the New Jersey Society of CPAs in 2000. A year or so later, my full-time position was subdivided; half of my time was devoted to communications work, and the other half was spent as the assistant to the manager of Information Technology. I became a part-time geek. Over time, I became reasonably proficient in desktop support, prepping and rolling out new workstations, upgrading systems, visual basic, SQL queries and programming, networking, digital A-V systems, and more. When it comes to computers, software, programming, and that sort of thing, I have a clue.

In 2008, Lin-Manual Miranda’s first Broadway show, In the Heights, made its debut. I saw it and I was impressed. It didn’t make my Top 10 list where Hamilton now resides, but it was still a “wow” theatrical experience for me. The infusion of hip-hop and rap-style lyrics—all in a bold, theatrical, story-telling context—now, that made sense to me. It was cool, and it was hot.

In one of my other avocations, I am a dance caller: contras, squares, circles, and lines. I have traveled from Washington D.C and Virginia to upstate New York and southern New England, calling dances. Most of these dances feature live music. For me, it’s a great opportunity to be close to the music I love. I’m not sufficiently skilled as a musician to play in a dance band, so it is sort of the next best thing.

Starting in 2010, a new wave started in the contra dance world: techno contra. Instead of dancing in a well-lighted hall with traditional tunes, these dances featured disco lighting effects, black light, glow necklaces, and a radically different style of music; sometimes live and sometimes from DJs, featuring grooves, beats, and big bass.

I wasn’t a huge fan, but I was intrigued. And the dance caller in me wanted to give techno a go. I raised my hand but didn’t get picked. Still, I was interested. 

In about 2012, the song Rapper’s Delight was brought to my attention by Sandra Bullock. I admire her as an actress and activist, and when she said, in a radio interview, that she knew all the words to the introduction to Rapper’s Delight, my interest was piqued. After hearing it, I decided that it would make a great intro to a dance at a techno contra. I learned the lyrics, practiced them, and, as a result, I was (kind of, sort of) doing some rapping.

Somewhere in this part of the timeline, I wondered to myself about the idea that something related to business—the American way of capitalism—could be part of a play. I read Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet and satisfied myself that it was a possibility.

The final element in this creation story, and I think it can be said to be the catalyst, arrived when I read Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon. In the book, Kleon proposes that all creative work is built on that which came before. Nothing is completely original. Mash-ups, remixes, and transformations—they are all part of the creative process.

Kleon makes two additional important points in Steal Like an Artist: Get to know your heroes (and sheroes). Study them. Don’t copy them, but emulate them. And—number three in his list of ten principles—“Write the book you want to read.” Taken in the context of theatre, that meant I had to write the play I’d like to see.

MuchAdoAboutNothingDotCom

In December of 2013, I completed the first draft of this play. I titled it MuchAdoAboutNothingDotCom and shared it with a few people. I submitted it to likely theatre groups that were accepting submissions. I realized that it was unlikely to get consideration from a professional theatre because the cast was too large, but I sent it out into the void.

Under the subheading of “production history” for this play, the only thing I can list is an unrehearsed, cold reading that was done by a high school drama club. I had led a dance as part of a fundraiser for the drama club and then donated my fee back to the group. The teacher in charge of the group arranged for the reading as a favor in return.

I learned two important things from the reading—the dialogue moved fast, and the play, overall, had a reasonable running time. 

There was a flurry of excitement when a professor at a college not too far away showed interest in the script. She loved it, she said. But she was retiring that same year, and the interest led nowhere.

The script sat quietly in my archives for a decade.

Upon Further Consideration

A lot happened between 2013 and 2023; things that might have made the script appear weaker and dated. Curiously, when I looked at it again, it seemed to me that it was stronger and, in some ways, prescient.

For one thing, the word “algorithm” emerged from relative anonymity into common parlance. In 2013, when I started writing the play and used that word, it was, I thought, fairly esoteric—a term that only computer nerds and math geeks would immediately grasp. However, the continued growth and power of social media and online sales websites brought the concept of an algorithm to people’s attention; it was “the algorithm” that determined what stories you saw, what ads were served, and what products appeared first on your screen. Algorithms have been in the news quite a bit over the last decade.

Rap and hip-hop are as big or bigger than ever. And then, in 2015, Hamilton exploded on Broadway. My play wasn’t a musical, but it was a play with rhymes and, as imagined, it had a beat.

I thought about the title: MuchAdoAboutNothingDotCom. It was problematic from a typographic perspective. One word. Too long. But there was something else that bothered me. The play, as I had reconceived it, was not about “nothing.” 

My script offers amusement, yes. A rom-com centered on appealing characters caught up in tangled relationships and beset by misunderstandings that leave us hoping for happy endings. But there’s more in this script; a great deal more.

This story highlights the risks and rewards of entrepreneurship and the impact of big money on small enterprises. It offers subtle commentary on discrimination based on race, gender, and age. There are references to family businesses, the challenges of “scaling up” a start-up, and the perils of mixing business and personal relationships. The play is seriously not about “nothing.”

And so, a new title: MuchAdoDotCom. A nod to the bard, a promise of rom-comic farce, but with the understanding that there is serious business to be dealt with.

An Entirely Optional Second Ending

In the final stages of the 2023 revisions, I found myself caught up with a new idea for the script: a coda. 

In music, a coda is a relatively short section of the score used to bring a movement or an entire piece into balance. Frequently it recapitulates major themes, allows listeners to experience the piece in brief, and then brings the music to a satisfying conclusion.

In my 2013 draft of MuchAdo, I proposed something like a coda for the production. I suggested that the performance might end in a dance. The music might begin with a traditional English Country Dance, and then segue into something modern; a beat.

For the 2023 revision to the script, I have proposed a somewhat different sort of coda. It merges a scripted curtain call into a final set of rhymes that, as in a classical music composition, restates a major theme and brings the piece to a satisfying conclusion.

It is an arbitrary and unnecessary appendage. The play can end beautifully with Mercy’s epilogue and a simple curtain call. However, the idea of a coda is available for the company’s consideration. I believe it has the potential to rock the house; leaving the audience–not just applauding–but cheering. Additionally, I have included the text that described the idea of ending with a dance from the 2013 script. 

The 2023 Edition

The final step in the 2023 revision process has been the creation of this paperback edition of the play. While most production companies soliciting submissions prefer an 8 1/2 x 11-inch page format in a Courier font, I felt that it would be helpful to make it available in a more compact form. I thought that an interesting cover design might help entice readers. The text could include a preface and additional notes to help people understand the history and intent of the script. 

While I think the script stands up quite well on its own, this additional background information seems to be a good way to help dramatic artists envision all of the creative opportunities the play offers. Perhaps the book will help them imagine the potential the script offers to engage audiences in a thoroughly contemporary way. If the leaders of a company were looking for a play that will appeal to younger audiences—people raised on rap and hip-hop—they might find it particularly interesting.

This volume, I believe, makes this new play more real and more tangible; something readers easily pass along to other interested parties. At the very least, it makes the script more readily available via personal contact or an online book seller. It is, of course, my hope that it will fall into the hands of someone associated with a theatre group who sees it as being worthy of at least a reading. Someone, perhaps dear reader, like you? And from there, well, a playwright can hope. 

Ridge Kennedy
2023