In Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, the young woman known as Hero is wrongly accused of adultery and fakes her death. She gets better, but is offstage for quite some time. And that provides an opening for the modern playwright Meghan Brown, who wrote What Happened While Hero Was Dead, to show Hero's side of what comes across as a decidedly un-feminist story.
Student actors at Southern Oregon University stage the play later this week (February 16th), under the direction of Holly Derr, visiting from the University of Memphis. The director sat down for an interview about the play, its themes, and a modern take on a story from an un-modern time.