MUCH ADO IN MESSINA.(Theater Review)

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 praised," he gasps, barely pausing for breath. "And mine that I was proud on; mine so much / That I myself was to myself not mine, / Valuing of her--why she, O she is fallen / Into a pit of ink, that the wide sea / Hath drops too few to wash her clean again, / And salt too little which may season give / To her foul, tainted flesh." It's a nightmarish moment, and it is almost unbearable to watch this Lear-like wrath fall on its passive, defenseless victim (Hero has fainted before the speech begins). But Waterston also lends pathos to Leonato's disgust--one's heart breaks as he flings invective--transforming Shakespeare's rage into an aria about the shattering of a dream. Leonato's dream, as Waterston presents it, was twofold. For him, Hero's wedding was a guarantee of a happy future for his daughter, one in which she would be loved and protected. It was proof, too, that he had succeeded as a father, that his daughter had matured into a caring, ethical being. Now that her double nature has been exposed--wrongly, of course--how can Leonato keep his grip on everything he once held dear? Ink runs through one's fingers, as does salt water.

Part of what makes Waterston's performance so arresting is his history as an actor in "Much Ado," one of Shakespeare's more emotionally challenging comedies. Thirty-two years ago, Waterston played Benedick, opposite the astonishing Kathleen Widdoes as Beatrice, in A. J. Antoon's celebrated staging, also at the Delacorte. (The production was filmed and is now available on DVD, as part of the invaluable Broadway Theatre Archives series.) As Benedick, Claudio's friend and fellow war hero, Waterston was as thin and lyrical as a river reed: his beauty lay in the delicacy of his projection and in his disarming awkwardness. He seemed to want to do anything but fight with Beatrice, which was an odd and refreshing interpretation of the role, given that Benedick and Beatrice's verbal sparring makes up the comic center of the play. In the current production, Waterston has not lost any of that charming hesitancy--he is a great listener when other actors take the stage--but one can see, too, how the gravitas that comes with time and experience has made him more than charming, has turned up the volume on his soul.

Here, Benedick, as played by Jimmy Smits, is all bluster and testosterone--a baby with chest hair. Smits's unabashed desire to be liked--to be loved by anyone but Beatrice, at first--wins the audience over. His formidable comedic skills could, however, have been tempered a little by the director, David Esbjornson, who treats the play as a kind of Restoration farce--transplanting it to the late nineteenth century and thus sacrificing or blurring some of Shakespeare's intricacy in favor of easy laughs and aural ...