After taking peeks behind the Schaeffer Theatre curtain since January, exploring the preparations for an ambitious �ֲ���ý theater production, the curtain has been raised.

And what a sight to behold.

From period costumes and a lavish set to comedic clowning and snappy wordplay (some in iambic pentameter!), this production of Much Ado About Nothing is a whirl of color, sounds, comedy, and music, recalling nothing less than the dazzling Technicolor splendor of a 1950s MGM musical.

And why shouldn’t it? Director and Assistant Professor of Theater Tim Dugan decided to move the setting from Italy in the 16th century to a coastal estate on Maine’s Mount Desert Island in the heady days right after World War II.

The Bar Harbor  “cottage” is represented by a two-story facade complete with a balcony sturdy enough to hold multiple players. A lush backyard garden blooms onstage, complemented by sounds of ocean waves and birdsong, and a live, five-piece student band performing swing-era classics like Glenn Miller’s “In The Mood.”

A group of khaki-clad Army officers returning home from the war are quickly invited to spend a month relaxing at an oceanside estate by its wealthy owner, Leonata (not Leonato — more on that later).

It’s an especially alluring invitation: Leonata has a lovely young daughter, Hero, and an alluring spitfire of a niece, Beatrice, living in the house, and they’ve got female friends about as well. 

Here’s a plot summary:

• The action involves two couples: Claudio and Hero, and Benedick and Beatrice.
• Claudio and Hero fall in love, but the villainous Don John threatens their relationship by orchestrating a misunderstanding involving Hero’s virtue.
• Meanwhile, Benedick and Beatrice, who’ve known each other forever, do a lot of sparky bantering, spurring a side plot by their friends to lead each to believe the other is in love with them. Which leads to actual declarations of love.
• The play ends with revelations and reconciliations; Claudio and Hero’s relationship is successfully restored.

What bullet points don’t tell us is that beneath these comic misunderstandings is an age-old Shakespearian theme of fragile masculinity: The men’s sense of power depends on women being faithful and chaste; the men need to dominate the conversations, both intentionally and unintentionally, and the women try to be heard.

Over the last two years, especially coming out of the pandemic, productions of Much Ado have toyed with the time and place of the play, and also the play’s gender dynamics. In the �ֲ���ý production, a few characters’ genders have been changed, inviting the audience to see how the emphasis changes with the perspective. 

For example, the character of Leonato, male governor of Messina in Shakespeare’s original, has become a woman, Leonata, a wealthy landowner.

Traditionally, in Act 5, Scene 1, Leonato (as a man) confronts Claudio for telling scandalous lies about his daughter, Hero. Claudio, joined by Don Pedro, treats him like a doddering fool, ignoring his claims. “I will not hear you,” says Don Pedro, which prompts Leonato to grumble, “I will be heard.” 

But in the �ֲ���ý production, the response, delivered by the female Leonata, played by Sydney Childs ’24 of Cohasset, Mass., is full of defiant rage.

In a panel discussion held a week prior to opening, Childs describes how she delivers the line. “I have to react to [Don Pedro’s line], and I don’t scream back immediately. I take a pause. We sit in silence; he has to realize that he just screamed at me in my ��dzܲ���.”&�Բ�����;

“It’s one of my favorite scenes,” said Katie Adkinson, an assistant professor of English and the production’s literary consultant and text coach. “He doesn’t get the last word in that scene.”

Beatrice’s and Benedick’s love-to-hate-you dynamic weaves in and out of the main conflict, as Beatrice, played by Emily Diaz ’23 of Corona, N.Y., unafraid to use her voice, finds herself at loggerheads with Benedick, who is maintaining his masculinity, fragile as it is.

During the panel discussion, Diaz talked about the challenge of playing Beatrice, “who feels like such a fire in the beginning but then something dims in her when she gets with Benedick.”

As they went through their weeks of rehearsals, Diaz came to embrace Beatrice. “She never shuts off — and she takes up space,” she said with a laugh. “As a woman of color who’s doing Shakespeare,  it feels good to be talking a lot and to be taking up space and to be having fun with that space. She’s saying whatever comes to mind because she feels like she’s entitled to put it out there. And she is. And I love that.”

One change they made that felt important for Diaz is at the end of the play: After Hero’s name is cleared, Benedick and Beatrice finally publicly admit their feelings for each other, they embrace. But instead of Benedick finally “catching” Beatrice, Beatrice flips the script: grabbing Benedick and dipping him for a kiss.

“It’s so much fun and it’s empowering,” Diaz said. “Yes, he can say, ‘Peace, I will stop your mouth with a kiss,’ but who determines how that kiss is going to be executed? There’s so much power in that and it helps us stay on the same playing field.”

Dazzling dresses and sparkling suits swing across the stage during the masked ball scene, as Emma Seitz ’25 of Brooklyn, N.Y., croons several tunes, accompanied by the band.

The most colorful (and loudest) part of the cast by far is the Watch, a group of Maine locals accompanying the local constable Dogberry (David Walker ’24 of Canton, Mass.) and his second in command Verges (Joaquin Torres ‘25 of Silang, Philippines) as they patrol Bar Harbor, or as the group calls it, “Bah Hahbah.”

Accompanied by a cacophony of noise at every entrance and exit, the Watch enter the story halfway through, providing instant comic relief in the midst of the tragic part of the play. 

John Wilkins ’23 of Chevy Chase, Md., Spencer Obiero ’25 of Nairobi, Kenya, and Brendan Fitzgerald ’23 of New Rochelle, N.Y., are the fully upright members of the Watch.

A fourth member, Caroline Cassell ‘24 of Woodstock, Vt., dressed in red buffalo plaid jacket and a matching cap, plays the part of an old Mainer in a scene-stealing, crouching crab walk.

Besides laughter and delight, a �ֲ���ý audience might take away ideas about forgiveness, says Adkinson. Throughout Shakespeare, and in Much Ado, “you see women forgive men for these horrible things, and you ask, ‘Why did you forgive them?’”

A play like this asks audiences to think about “what is required to live under certain social norms. Any relationship, specifically any relationship under a heteropatriarchy, relies on forgiveness. How often are women quietly forgiving men, because it is easier than picking a fight? 

“In our relationships, we rely on forgiveness. But the tenor of that forgiveness also changes depending on who we are and how we embody ourselves in the world.”

Also, there’s solidarity in forgiveness. Beatrice helps to convince Benedick to choose solidarity with Leonata in support of wronged Hero.

“One of the things the play is teaching us that solidarity is still a choice. Beatrice gets Benedick to choose to place his solidarity with the women. To choose solidarity with the women — it’s huge.”

On the Schaeffer Theater stage, a group of students are warming up, rhythmically stepping and swinging together to “SOS” by Rihanna. 

They’re the cast of the �ֲ���ý theater production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing — which opens March 16 —&�Բ�����;and they’re learning the East Coast Swing.

Rihanna might seem an unusual song for a dance whose heyday was during the mid-1900s big band era. And swing dancing is surely an odd addition to a Shakespeare play. But the dance fits just right for this production, set when swing was still king, right after World War II, on a coastal estate on Maine’s Mount Desert Island.

The actors, wearing bejeweled and be-feathered masks, will debut their swing skills during the play’s masked ball scene; Rihanna will be replaced by Glenn Miller and his big-band classic, “In The Mood,” played by a small band on the Schaeffer stage.

One of the advantages of East Coast Swing, which has a six-count basic step, is that you can dance it to pretty much anything, Rihanna included, says Mia Bernstein ’23, a double major in dance and anthropology from Bedford, Mass., who is teaching the cast swing, with help from Peter Nguyen ’24, a physics major from Philadelphia, and Lauren Reed ’23, a dance and Africana major from Baton Rouge, La.

When Tim Dugan, an assistant professor of theater and the director of the play, asked Bernstein if she could teach swing to the cast, she knew she had to get Nguyen, a fellow member of the �ֲ���ý Ballroom Team, on board.

“If I’m teaching, I need a partner because I can’t do both sides of the footwork at the same time,” Bernstein explains. “I know all the follower steps, but I don’t know what his feet are doing half the time. I just know what his arms are telling me to do. And so we kind of work together to make sure that nobody’s tripping over their own feet and getting bad directions.”

But it’s more than smooth footwork: After digging into the history of East Coast Swing, which evolved from the Lindy Hop, born in the Black neighborhoods of Harlem, Bernstein knew that “there was no way we can do this without acknowledging and working with the roots of the dance.”

With Reed’s help, Bernstein has been performing a sort of “reverse archeology” of the dance, poring over old dance manuals, videos of performers, and history texts, to “put the Black and jazz aesthetics back into this dance and attribute it to the people who created it and who it really belongs to,” says Bernstein.

One major change, says Bernstein, is the posture. European-style ballroom dance — and especially competitive ballroom dance — features a more rigid, straight-backed posture, similar to that of ballet. The original posture, with its jazz roots, had a lower center of gravity, and was more loose and fluid. This is what they’re teaching the Much Ado cast.

And it’s obvious from watching the cast rehearse that they are having fun figuring out how their characters dance the East Coast Swing. Most are wearing their costume shoes, and the clowns of the cast — Dogberry, Verges, and the Watch — are bringing their inner clowns to the choreography.

Out in the house, facing the stage, Lucie Green ’23 is typing speedily on her laptop, jotting down notes on everything happening onstage. She’s a theater and English major from Pittsburgh, and this production is in partial fulfillment of her theater thesis in stage management. 

It’s also the first Shakespeare credit on her resume. She’s been prepping for the show since last summer, studying the text and gathering an endless list of every entrance, exit, stage cue, scripted prop, setting, and character description

“I think that the stage manager really just has to have a working knowledge of every aspect of the production to be able to do it successfully,” Green says. She has a maze of folders of documents and spreadsheets living on her computer, full of notes on the text, schedules, to-do lists and deadlines, notes from every rehearsal, and much, much more.

For part of her thesis, she’s writing a handbook in stage management that she hopes will be useful to future students interested in stage management. It’s based on her own subjective experience, she says, but has tips on creating a good theater environment.

“For the environment to be healthy and fulfilling and sustainable, that’s really the most important thing to me,” Green says. “Because that’s the only way that people are going to enjoy it and that’s more important than the little mechanics that I’m working on.”

As everyone involved in the production heads into the final week of rehearsals and adjustments, the actors really start to hone in on their characters, Dugan says, and their collaboration with the stage manager and technical team really starts to blossom. 

A lot can change in a week, “and that’s kind of the wonderful thing about the play process, is that it starts gradually becoming the actors’ journey,” he says. “There’s a real feeling of giving it over because they’re the ones who are going to be doing it.”

One level below the Schaeffer Theatre stage, the carpenter shop is buzzing with sound. Natalia Jacobs ’26 of Amherst, Mass., is busy vacuuming dust from a set of French doors, recently pulled out of storage, before painting them a shade of mossy green.

Gideon Berrie ’26 of New York City is carrying pieces of lumber up to the stage, which is in the middle of a huge transformation: By March 16, opening night of the �ֲ���ý theater production of Much Ado About Nothing, the set will transport the audience to the backyard of a summer estate in Bar Harbor, Maine, in September 1945.

The set is anchored by a 16-foot, two-story facade evoking the exterior of a famed Mount Desert Island “cottage,” otherwise known as a mansion. On the second level, the newly painted French doors will open onto a balcony overlooking a garden, bandstand (where a five-piece band will perform), trellis, and lawn, which is currently rolled up and sitting in the entrance to the theater, waiting to be patchworked onto the floor.

All this construction is getting a hand from one of the experts brought in for the production, Aidan McDowell, a carpenter who usually works on real houses — and most recently, tiny houses — and not facades that last only a few weeks.

McDowell, who lives in Pennsylvania, has worked on other �ֲ���ý productions, and while he’s got a slew of student workers helping in the carpentry shop, many haven’t quite honed their talents.

And that’s part of what draws McDowell back to �ֲ���ý; in fact, for this gig, he drove through the night in early January for the start of the semester. “It’s definitely a lot of fun to work with students and teach them how to work with their hands.”

Justin Moriarty, the technical director for theater and dance, oversees the work done in the carpentry shop. Whether it’s learning how to use a saw, properly calculate measurements, or even how to work from a plan on paper, the skills that students in the shop gain are both practical (to fix that sagging bookshelf)  “and really empowering for students,” he says.

“I’ll explain it, and then I have them do it. I never do it myself; it’s about them doing it,” Moriarty says. “And then I’ll say, ‘Here’s some tips about this.’ And then if they’re still having trouble, then I give them hints until they get it. And so the empowering piece of that is they get it. It’s not because I am telling them exactly what they need to do, it’s because I’m working with them as individuals.”

For Jacobs, who did theater in high school, this is her first time working behind-the-scenes and helping build a set. “It’s kind of cathartic,” she says. “It’s nice to take a break and do something hands-on and creative.”

She’s also excited to take her skills home, to her father, who used to work in carpentry. She gets to do a little bit of everything. “One day I’ll be helping with the siding, which involves more power tools, and today I’m painting. You really develop a diverse range of skills.”

The Much Ado set was designed by Judy Gailen, who has designed theater and opera scenery throughout the U.S. for more than three decades, at Bowdoin since 2000 and for Emerson and Dartmouth colleges, Princeton University, and the Yale Repertory Theatre. 

Scenography wasn’t her first career — she also has a background in mime, clowning, and movement theater, as well as graphic design — and it probably won’t be her last, she laughs. 

When she thinks about designing a set, Gailen first analyzes the text. “I need to think about what the story’s telling; is it a comedy? Is it a drama? For me, designing for Shakespeare is always hard because Shakespeare was written in a time where they did not really have scenery, so he describes everything.”

The goal is to create a set that evokes the place, and is immersive enough that the audience isn’t confused, but doesn’t overpower the action onstage. 

So the “cottage” that now dominates the Schaeffer stage can be big enough for a balcony scene, but not too big, and the garden gate needs to be striking, but not a scene-stealer. It’s all about the balance.

One of the most tedious parts of this set in particular, she says, is the rocks, which will help to bring the seas to the stage. “There are lots of rocks in Maine, and rocks are hard to paint. So I tried to cut down the number of rocks I have to paint, which is why the garden wall is not a rock wall — which is probably what it would be.”

A good set transports the audience to a time and place as soon as they glimpse the stage, she explains. 

She , an American stage designer in the early 20th century, who said that stage design “should be addressed to [the] eye of the mind… It echoes, it enhances, it animates. It is an expectancy, a foreboding, a tension. It says nothing, but it gives everything.”

“I’ve seen shows where I come in, I sit down, I don’t know what the heck to expect from the play, but the design is such that I trust that I will find out — eventually,” said Gailen.

“So a lot of it is about trust from your audience.”

“Clowns are poets of the heart,” Wesley Broulik tells the �ֲ���ý students sitting on the Schaeffer Theatre stage. “It’s amazing how close tears and laughter are to each other.”

It’s a Friday afternoon, and Broulik, an actor, director, and teacher, is in town for two days to give clowning lessons to the cast of the �ֲ���ý theater department’s forthcoming production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.

Broulik isn’t so much teaching the students how to clown, explains Tim Dugan, assistant professor of theater and director of the �ֲ���ý production. “This isn’t like birthday party clowns with red noses.”

Rather, the goal is to help the actors access their inner clown, to “get underneath some of the masks we tend to wear for various reasons,” he says. “Clowning can be very playful and very athletic — and very vulnerable. A clown doesn’t have lines and doesn’t have anything to hide behind.”

Everyone, Broulik told the students, has a clown within, and learning how to tap into that playful, larger-than-life persona is essential for theater. “And there’s no such thing as ‘bad’ theater,” he tells the students, “only theater with bad play in it.”

During the Friday session, Broulik led the cast in warmup exercises to get a feel for how their bodies interact with each other and the stage. There were games, focusing on expression, movement, and emotions. “Friday was to get students playing more ensemble and really making big choices and following impulse,” said Dugan. 

Some of the exercises that Broulik led tapped into that closeness between tears and laughter: everyone stood in a circle, and took turns “passing the laugh,” and then “passing the cry.” Dugan was impressed with how the students responded to Broulik’s methods. “It was done in such an embodied, authentic, honest way. It was really moving,” says Dugan.

Another exercise played on how to express emotion and tone without words. Broulik gave an action, like saying “hello,” and then set a tempo and a size for delivering it, on a scale of one to seven. An everyday “hello” would have a tempo and size of three, Broulik said, and you should never see a three onstage.

Clowning around, says Dugan, helps actors “think with their bodies” and “find different traits in their characters that they might not find by working analytically with script. And when we get to the play, we can kind of adjust the dial.”

On Saturday, Broulik, who is an assistant professor of acting and directing at Central Connecticut State University and producing artistic director of Time’s Fool Company, led a second session that was geared toward the “clowns” in the ensemble: Dogberry, Verges, and the four members of the Watch, a comedic group of locals moonlighting as a sort of neighborhood watch.

Joaquin Torres ’25 of Silang, Philippines, is playing the part of Verges, second-in-command to Dogberry, leader of the Watch. It’s Torres’ first time playing a clown character, and finding their inner clown has been one of the best parts of the process.

During one exercise, they ran around the stage to find an object, and then acted as if that object was something they’d never seen before. 

“I found a tape measure and I was like, ‘what the hell is this?’ Like I knew what a tape measure is and I know what it does, but actually using it was like,  in the eyes of a clown, in the eyes of a child, I guess, who is just learning about the world, it’s just a refreshing feeling.”

“There’s no reason to feel afraid of acting stupid or crazy,” Torres said. “It’s so much fun to embrace your inner clown, no matter whether you’re acting or in real life.”

Broulik and Dugan have worked together in various theater productions for about a decade. Broulik’s approach to making theater — and clowning — is just right for this play and in this year, says Dugan. “I want this particular production, nearly post-COVID, to be a raucous celebration.” 

Last summer, Dugan was directed by Broulik in a production of Much Ado About Nothing staged by the Saratoga Shakespeare Company in New York. Dugan played Benedick, one of the main characters, and a member of the Watch. The production was presented in the round, with few set pieces and costume changes, which meant that Dugan and his fellow actors had to tap into their physicality — their inner clown.

That got Dugan thinking about how he wanted the �ֲ���ý production of Much Ado to feel.

“There are so many different ways to come into a Shakespeare play as a director, and what interests me in this moment and time for Much Ado is the focus on celebrating human reconnection coming out of something traumatic like a war or a pandemic,” said Dugan.

“What is it like to laugh, embrace, or share a summer evening with friends and loved ones? I don’t want to give away all of the surprises, but the energy and spirit of a raucous celebration infuses every aspect of this production.”

A pair of iconic Bean boots. A bright yellow sou’wester. A bucket hat covered in colorful fly-fishing lures. 

They aren’t your typical costume props for a Shakespearean play, but “they all belong in Maine,” says Carol Farrell, who is directing costume design for the forthcoming �ֲ���ý production of Much Ado About Nothing, set in Bar Harbor, Maine, in 1945. 

Tacked to one wall of the costume shop — next to a rack holding hundreds of colorful thread spools, are some of Farrell’s sketches of costumes, including Dogberry, a bumbling constable character, and several period archetypes of rural and coastal Maine: a hunter, a farmer, lobstermen, and a “sport.” 

These characters, who comprise a kind of neighborhood watch in the play, are key to giving the play a Maine feel, says Farrell. In rural Maine, “especially at that time, people wore a lot of hats, literally. A lobsterman during the day might help the constable at night, that kind of thing.”

While a real 1945 Maine lobsterman might change clothes before his night job, in the play “there’s an internal logic to why these people are watchmen and they look this particular way. And it gives us a chance to play with being in Maine in a fun way.”

Among the watch, the only out-of-stater is the “sport,” a character that Farrell says harkens back to the early days of Maine tourism. “It was what the Maine Guides called the well-heeled people ‘from away’ who hired them. It was not a compliment, since the Guides had all the knowledge and did all of the work.”

He’s definitely “from away,” as they say, “up from Connecticut or Massachusetts or whatever, to experience the Maine wilderness,” Farrell explains. “The Maine Guides would paddle them around and they could do their fly fishing from the special little seat in the middle of the canoe that has a back to it — the ‘sport’ seat — and the sport was paddled around.”

The modern-day equivalent would be a tourist who is intent on getting the shot “for the ’Gram.” 

So Farrell’s “sport” wears impractical white boat shoes, plaid Bermuda shorts, a fishing vest, bucket hat, and a short-sleeve, button-up shirt emblazoned with more fish than the old sport has ever caught by himself.

“No Mainer would be caught dead looking like this,” Farrell laughs. “But it’s what the out-of-stater thinks he ought to look like when he comes to Maine to be an outdoorsman.”

The fishing hat is a creative masterpiece in itself, festooned with mock fishing lures and flies, created by Adelle Welch ’25.

Among the 1,800 or so students at �ֲ���ý, Welch might be the very best person to create a fishing cap. She grew up in Livingston, Mont., a small city along the Yellowstone River that’s home to the International Fly Fishing Federation museum, of all things.

As a child, she learned to tie flies from her grandfather. “I spent a lot of time with him in the summer on the river,” says Welch, recalling his fly-tying setup and “all the fun feathers and stuff. They looked so cool.” 

All that experience helps her bring authentic details to the faux flies, such as adding “little eyes to mimic nymph flies, which are the ones that live at the bottom of the river.” Meanwhile, dry flies float on the top of the water. They’re more decorative, made with “feathers and stuff.”

Welch used a range of crafting supplies to create her flies, such as safety pins, string, fuzzy colored pipe cleaners, and ribbons —&�Բ�����;believable enough from a distance to catch an audience, hook, line, and sinker.

Stepping into the costume shop tucked under the stairs in Schaeffer Theatre is like entering a whole new world: colorful fabrics cover the walls, along with photos of costumes from past productions, spools of colored thread are impaled on a rack on the wall, and in the back, guarded by a small army of mannequins, racks and racks of costumes hang waiting to be worn.

It’s 2:20 in the afternoon, and Carol Farrell, supervisor of the costume shop, is taking a tea break with two of her student workers. Afternoon tea is a long-held tradition in the costume shop, but it’s more than just a moment to relax: it’s a time to swap inspiration, life updates, or really anything.

The shop is a sort of organized chaos (emphasis on the “organized” part), and it’s currently ground zero for an upcoming production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, set for March 16–20.

Rather than 16th-century Italy, director Tim Dugan, an assistant professor of theater, has placed the play three centuries later and a continent away. Instead of soldiers returning to the Italian harbor town of , this production will have U.S. Army veterans returning to the idyllic Maine harbor town of Bar Harbor, on Mount Desert Island.

The move to mid-1900s Maine — and the large cast, with 25 characters — has helped to make the play one of the largest costumed productions Farrell has tackled in her 12 years at �ֲ���ý, featuring some 70 costumes.

“It’s not unusual for me to have 70 dance costumes, but they’re a little simpler than this,” she shrugs. “It’s a little intense, but it’s all fun. I’m just really committed to this show, for it to be fun — and it should be not just fun to have people watch it, but fun to make and fun to do.”

For Farrell, the time and setting of the play has a special meaning: Her mother, who was born in 1911, had a summer romance in 1933 with a British naval officer visiting Bar Harbor, before he was moved elsewhere, finally ending up stationed in the South China Sea.

They corresponded for years afterwards, exchanging letters and gifts, and even became engaged. “It was all terribly romantic until she dumped him and married my father,” Carol says. “But I feel like I can see her in the young women in this play who are entertaining these returning troops, so I feel like I know these people and I’m channeling her in a fond way as I work on the piece. So that sort of makes it sparkle for me a little bit.”

The cast was finalized only last week, and the whole team just had their first meeting, affectionately referred to as the “dog and pony show,” where they presented their ideas and plans going forward, and met the finalized cast. “There were 30 people in the room,” Farrell laughs. “It’s really a great ensemble and it’s gonna be a great show.”

After tea is over, Lauren Reed ’23 of Baton Rouge, La., gets to work picking out the trim on the shoulder of a U.S. military jacket. Before joining the costume shop last year, she worked in the carpentry shop.

“I love getting to work behind the scenes,” she says. “When I see a piece I worked on being worn onstage, I’m part of the play.”

Next to the double doors of the costume shop, there’s a whole rack full of pieces of various World War II-era U.S. Army infantry uniforms, waiting to be altered and decorated. To figure out precisely what those uniforms looked like in 1945, Farrell enlisted the help of her husband, John. Together, they operated Figures of Speech Theatre, a puppet theatre, and have brought their craft to the �ֲ���ý stage several times, including last year’s “Antigonick.”

“My husband — who knows nothing about the military, but is a super-good history researcher — he took on the task and now we’ve ordered all the proper patches and stars and insignia and I know where to put them on the uniforms.”

A little to the right of the uniforms, pinned to the wall and trailing swatches of brightly patterned fabrics, are some sketches Farrell drew for various other costumes; some generic summer dresses, featuring the classic 1940s fitted silhouette; wedding dresses for the four “brides-in-disguise” near the end of the play; gear for some fishermen; and special ensembles for Dogberry and Verges, who provide comic relief as the constable and his partner.

Dogberry and Verges are two characters that make costuming especially fun, says Farrell, since they’re the “clown” characters. In fact, the two actors are getting actual clown lessons for the roles, so Farrell has been hustling to get as many costume pieces together beforehand, “so they have something to play with,” like tie-on mustaches, big boots, and suspenders.

But the one scene she’s most looking forward to dressing? “The masked ball,” she grins. “Every costume needs to be super sparkly and every mask needs to be fabulous, so what’s not to like?”

Indeed, a rack of silky, glittery, and sequined dresses, skirts, pants, and blazers are waiting to be picked for each character. Elsewhere in the room are boxes full of masks in every color, shape, and degree of fabulousness, and a wall of drawers full of sequins, buttons, glitter, zippers, and assorted findings of every kind imaginable. It’s a costumer’s treasure trove.

But for now, measurements need to be obtained, and then the real work can begin: matching the right pieces to the right people, deciding where adjustments and alterations need to be made, and where the “blanks” are; costumes that need to be sourced or made from scratch.

The mood so far is cheerful, and everyone is excited to work on the production. “And hopefully,” Farrell adds, “that’ll be enough to carry us through.”