By Kira Shannon
For UC Santa Barbara students in the Naked Shakes theater company, Shakespeare isn’t just an academic subject—it’s also a passion project. This quarter, their hard work culminated in an outdoor production of Much Ado About Nothing where they explored the intricacies of early modern English and brought timeless characters to life to engage and entertain.
The audience, including family and friends of the actors, UCSB literature students, and supportive faculty, gathered at the Theater and Dance Department courtyard to enjoy a performance of a story that many of them had never seen before. Throughout the show, the audience clapped, cheered and howled with laughter, responding to this classic work in an unconventional setting.
“It's our job to make the art accessible,” said lead actor Rodolphe Le Feuvre, who played the part of Benedict.
A live band accompanied the actors in Much Ado About Nothing, playing through transitions between scenes and during party scenes.
The outdoor venue provided ample natural lighting and a simplistic set design. A few chairs and benches, a pot of flowers, and band equipment were the only objects on the “stage,” which was a grassy lawn. This non-traditional spot for a show created a more intimate relationship between the stage and the crowd, bringing more out of the actors during the performance than usual, said lead actress Sara Sadjadi, who played Beatrice. “In other plays you have to think about lighting and blocking, this one was all about the actor.”
Theater professor Irwin Appel, the director and mastermind behind the recent production believes that the best way to study a play is to perform it, and that’s exactly how he has taught Shakespeare to his students throughout his time at UCSB. The rehearsal process is very precise, Appel said. Students first read the text together carefully. Appel stops them at almost every phrase, dissecting what exactly their characters are saying.
UCSB Theater professor Irwin Appel directed the Naked Shakes recent performance. “We are digging into the text,” he said of his student rehearsals.
Language was especially important in this year’s production because this was the only Naked Shakes show that has been held outside, since those performed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Students had to rely on their expression of characters to create a vivid version of the story. Nonetheless, Appel believes that if you take a group of actors in a space, with the imagination of the audience, magic will occur.
“It’s important that people have an experience with Shakespeare,” Appel said. “When they go on, they can either choose to never engage or they can get hooked on Shakespeare.”
The cast in a Naked Shakes production comes in with varying degrees of experience, both working with Shakespeare and acting, so Appel finds it particularly thrilling to unlock deeper understandings of these plays. “I often think of ourselves as detectives and we are digging into the text, finding clues of how to bring it out in the most exciting and interesting way,” he said. Under Appel's direction, the group rehearsed for five weeks before performing, maintaining a quick pace while allowing students time to dive into their characters.
A select few of those who are in the play had no previous experience at all, which challenged Appel to transform them as actors. “The challenges are also why we do it,” Appel says. “In a Naked Shakes production, the actor does everything. There’s not a lot of scenery or other elements.” Although it may seem unusual for a play to have little set design or reliance on lighting, Appel favors this type of performance because it’s how he learned to act and direct. He said that during his time studying at Julliard he grasped the importance of spoken word over any other element of a performance. “The intimacy, the spareness, the intention on the acting in the story, brought to life some of these classic plays like Shakespeare’s,” he said.
“The more people spend their whole lives on a screen, the simplicity of being in a live setting with people…interaction between actors and audience is not only really exciting, but necessary for society.”
Sara Sadjadi, left, played Beatrice and Rodolphe Le Feuvre played Benedict, in the recent UCSB Naked Shakes outdoor production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.
Rodolphe Le Feuvre, a senior who played the part of Benedict, says he values Appel’s literal approach to the script. “What [Appel] likes about the process is, the point is not to make it flashy but to focus on the language itself,” Le Feuvre said. Prior to Much Ado About Nothing, Le Feuvre had acted in many other productions, which sets him apart from some of Appel’s other students. A select few of those who are in the play had no previous experience, which challenged Appel to transform them as actors.
Le Feuvre said that Appel believes some of the best theater he has ever seen took place in classrooms, and he channels this principle through his teaching methods for his students. Once the students in Much Ado About Nothing had properly dissected the language, “scenes came naturally because of our impulses and desires to communicate these characters,” Le Feuvre said.
Le Feuvre believes that in this day and age it’s better to watch than to read Shakespeare’s work. “The story, we have seen it and we know it. What you get to appreciate is how the story is told and how the language is more profound than seen in rom-coms today.” The show depicts many aspects of romantic cinema today, yet the poetic language performed live produces a new reverence for a centuries-old work, he said.
Kira Shannon is a second-year UC Santa Barbara student majoring in Film and Media Studies. She is a web and social media intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.