Inservice with Timothy Douglas

The upcoming Folger production of Much Ado About Nothing is rooted in the customs of Trinidad and played on a set that reproduces the alley at 13th and H Streets NE in Washington. Timothy Douglas, the production’s director, told us how this came about.

“I never bend Shakespeare to my concept,” Douglas says. “If the concept doesn’t work, I have to adjust.” But the vision of a Much Ado that takes place during the preparations for a big celebration like Carnivale—a concept that came to Douglas in a telephone conversation with Folger producing director Janet Griffin—just kept working for him. Attending a Caribbean festival in his hometown of Brooklyn focused Douglas’s attention on Trinidad; hanging out with Trinidadian musicians in Washington got him thinking about the African roots of their music and customs.

So, for his production, Leonato’s house becomes a present-day urban community center where local Trinidadians are making a float for the Carnivale parade. The masked ball and even the wedding in the play are only dress rehearsals for the big parade itself. The setting allows for new twists on a number of the characters—Dogberry, for example, is the self-appointed watchman of the neighborhood; Borachio is a woman in a rather dysfunctional relationship with Don John.

Douglas, who originally trained as an actor, auditions his casts by getting up and reading with them himself. For Much Ado, he has brought together actors he has worked with in the past as well as ones new to him and to the Folger. Washington audiences may recognize his Benedict, Howard Overshown, a D.C. native who started his career here before moving to New York. Craig Wallace and Doug Brown, also in the cast, are also familiar Washington faces.

Douglas did his early work as an actor at Tina Packer’s Shakespeare and Company in Lenox, Massachusetts. Packer’s belief that American actors were physically and psychologically well suited to Elizabethan language freed Douglas from anxiety about classical work. He also was inspired by company co-founder Kristin Linklater’s vocal technique, which emphasizes the body’s need to communicate as well as its connection to the vocal apparatus. The work of these two women informs Douglas’s physical approach to Shakespeare to this day, as both actor and director.

Since 1995, Douglas has lived the life of an itinerant director, working at Yale Rep, Actors’ Theater of Louisville and American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, among many others. He notes that, though staying home in Brooklyn looks increasingly appealing, he is delighted to be back at the Folger, where a 1995 production of Richard III was in fact his professional directorial debut. He thanks Janet Griffin for inviting him back to Much Ado and a “directing reunion.”