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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
The idiosyncratic, perpetually boyish, and unequivocally American actor Sam Waterston is giving the performance of his career as the alternately loving, baffled, and furious patriarch Leonato in Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing" (at the Delacorte Theatre, in Central Park). The governor of Messina, on the island of Sicily, Leonato is also the father of Hero (played by Waterston's own daughter, the lovely Elisabeth Waterston) and the guardian of Beatrice, his niece (Kristen Johnston). At first, Leonato is the most genial father figure imaginable. He's as impressed and unthreatened by Beatrice, with her verbal dexterity and her disdain for the less fair sex, as he is by his more magnanimous daughter, who has the ability to calm her cousin's blustery nature. More often than not, Leonato is amused by the way Hero plays the femme to Beatrice's butch.
But when, in Act IV, his faith in his daughter is shaken--Hero's intended, Claudio (Lorenzo Pisoni), accuses her of infidelity just moments before they're to be married--Leonato's love turns to cold gray ash. Waterston skillfully lets us see the embers burning beneath. Looking directly at Hero, who is dressed in virginal confectionary white, Leonato sees nothing but black. "But mine, and mine I loved, and mine I...
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