While almost everyone knows of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, his less known play Much Ado About Nothing is rarely given enough credit.

This past Thursday, Friday and Saturday, the Shakespeare Club set the plot of Much Ado About Nothing alive in the Waud, portraying the typical struggles of high school in the 16th century: a villain, a love affair and everything in between.

Although it was written over five centuries ago, there remain parallels to today’s society.

“I think that it’s very high school, in that it’s very much ‘I’m too nervous to talk to the girl I like, can you do it for me?’ ” co-director Amye Elfin said.

The play was performed to honor and celebrate Shakespeare’s 450th birthday, or rather his baptism. Shakespeare’s birthday is unknown so people celebrate the date of his baptism—April 26th, 1564.

The show is a comedy, and showcases two couples: Benedick and Beatrice, and Claudio and Hero.

The club performed a condensed version of Shakespeare’s original play because it was a school production, sophomore Simone Augustine (Don Pedro) said.

The club raised a fair amount of money through fundraisers to support the club. The money was used to create the set, buy costumes and help fund next year’s play. It also raised over $900 from ticket and concession sales.

Although the cast was predominantly female, the actors had no trouble portraying romances. The relationship between Hero (junior Becca Haven) and Claudio (sophomore Zoe Berkovitz), and also between Beatrice (senior Emily Harburg) and Benedick (sophomore Emma Wolfe) did not falter in any way because of gender.

“Acting in a relationship with Beatrice was a little bit difficult to navigate at first, but once we got into our characters and established the basics of their relationship, it didn’t make much of a difference at all,” Wolfe said.

Because understanding early-modern English can be difficult, the actors were very expressive to help the audience better understand the play.

“The facial expressions were priceless,” sophomore David Whyman said. “It was just wonderful the way that they made it understandable even if you can’t understand every single word that they say—the wonderful acting just totally makes up for it.”

While the acting was close to perfect, the Waud’s small stage was definitely not an ideal space for the performance.

“The Waud is its own kind of challenge,” Elfin said. “It’s a very flat audience space so we can’t do as much off stage as we’d like to, so we kind of do the best with what we can.”

As in all Shakespearian plays, there was an important moral behind the complicated plot and various puns.

“I think this play does do a really good job of showing the audience how human all the characters are,” said Elfin. “As cliché as it sounds, it really is about the fact that nobody is perfect.”

Much Ado About Nothing: Behind the Scenes from The Black & White Online on Vimeo.