Q&A with Karen Ann Daniels

The Reading Room Festival (January 30–February 2) features new work and conversations inspired by, in response to, or in dialogue with the plays of William Shakespeare. Leading up to the festival, we’re doing a Q&A series with the creators involved.

The works presented at The Reading Room Festival are at various points in their development from page to stage. For The Beatrice Project, the creative process is just getting started. Artistic Director of Folger Theatre and Director of Programming and Performance at the Folger Shakespeare Library Karen Ann Daniels discusses her hopes for what will happen during the Festival’s open rehearsal of her play, a musical exploration of the songs in Much Ado About Nothing and the comedy’s hero, Beatrice. Read more in the Q&A below and join us for the open rehearsal on Saturday, February 1, at 4pm.

Q&A

Can you share about the original idea for The Beatrice Project?

The initial idea has essentially been in my mind for quite some time about creating a musical of Much Ado About Nothing, the first Shakespeare play that I ever fell in love with. As I’ve grown older, I’ve become more fascinated with how Beatrice exists. Beatrice is such an anomaly in the world of Shakespeare in many ways, in that she lives in this patriarchal structure, very much like an independent woman, but still within the bounds of what was deemed appropriate, and there’s a freeness about her that I enjoy.

As we’ve seen more Black women in leadership roles, I’ve returned to Beatrice, too: What does it mean to be a woman like Beatrice? What does it mean to be a Black woman in leadership? What is the personal cost? And from there, I started to think about where I learned what it meant to be a Black woman. Growing up in the late 1980s and early 1990s, music videos were such a huge part of my life, creating both a  visual and musical vocabulary for what it what it meant to have voice as a Black woman, and as a Black woman in love, from Diana Ross, Ashford & Simpson, Janet Jackson, Lauryn Hill, even early hip hop like Queen Latifah and MC Lyte.  So, all of that is part of this inspiration, too.

What might an open rehearsal for an idea even look like?

As we were discussing the idea of hosting an open rehearsal for the Reading Room Festival, I was invited by Red Bull Theatre to do a session, and I was originally going to do a session about Black love with some scholars, building my research, curiosity, and inspiration there. Then, I realized that maybe we should do this in the Festival. I’ve been thinking: How do I begin a new work, a new idea? I wonder if other people are curious about the process, too.

A Room in the Castle and By the Queen take their inspiration from what Shakespeare has written, but these women playwrights try to fill in the blanks about what we don’t know about those women characters, and we do this by looking through our lived experiences as women and coming up with new stories to tell. That’s also the inspiration for The Beatrice Project. It’s so early with the idea that it may end up as Much Ado About Nothing: The Musical, or Beatrice: The Musical, or maybe it evolves into Beatrice and Hero Save the Day.  I don’t know yet, and that’s what this project is all about.

The Beatrice Project is your initial idea, but you are imagining a very collaborative project involving a scholar and an MC. Can you share more?

When we worked with Faedra Chatard Carpenter on Metamorphoses, which was a production so much about the Black experience, there was a lot of synergy in terms of the way she thinks and works through the dramaturgy and the contemporary way she pulls herself into the text. And then Miki Vale, who is an MC and DJ: we’re the same age, we are both the hip-hop generation, and we both grew up in Southern California. There’s a deep affinity, but we’ve never worked on a project together before. My goal is to create some new songs during this open rehearsal, not necessarily develop a full script, but try to identify what are the key emotional moments to chart out Beatrice’s journey.

Is there a particular song or line from Much Ado About Nothing that especially resonates with you at this point in The Beatrice Project?

I’ve been thinking a lot about Beatrice’s line, “O God, that I were a man!” I think a lot about what she’s asking of Benedick in that moment, how to show up for a woman. She’s challenging him, because he’s a loyal guy. When people talk about Benedick, they say how loyal he is in addition to being funny. They have a lot in common, and the difference is as a woman, she basically says, “Show me, don’t tell me.” In Gary Chapman’s The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate, it seems like men show their love through words of affirmation and physical touch, and women show through acts of service. So, it makes total sense in this moment that they’re declaring their love for each other that she asks him to prove his valor, his loyalty, his love.

What’s next for The Beatrice Project?

I’m taking it to New York in March and doing another workshop at Red Bull. After that, I will have a better understanding of whether this is a work that adapts from Shakespeare with all new words, or cutting and piecing together language from Shakespeare, or if there is a full rewrite: Is this really Beatrice’s story or Beatrice and Hero’s story? Or maybe we take it back to where the idea started, as a musical.

What else do you want people to know about the Reading Room Festival?

I want to invite people on a journey of creation. What does it mean to take inspiration from a play we all love, and we revere, and play with it. That is the heart of the Festival. Shakespeare’s words have become a part of our personal and artistic language, and that’s so important to his legacy because all kinds of people across our community and across the globe find their voice in Shakespeare. It’s not just regurgitating his words or coming up with a new context for it. It is literally people finding their own voice when they encounter his texts. I feel like, if Shakespeare was sitting here today, he’d be like, “This is rad.”