Editor's Note: This is the first of what will hopefully be quite a few entries about my week-long trip to England. We're back now, we had a jolly good time, and school starts tomorrow. Here's to the prospect of developing my travel writing.

Last week Shelly and I went to a performance of "Much Ado About Nothing" at Shakespeare's Globe Theater in London. We paid the groundling price (5 pounds) and took our place, standing on the concrete floor only about ten feet away from the stage.

The actors came on, and after a moment, it dawned on me. I whispered to Shelly: "This is an all-female cast." We were so dumbfounded by the idea that we entirely missed the first witty exchange between Benedic and Beatrice. There wasn't a man onstage except the non-speaking troubador playing the recorder above the main stage.

They obviously had come up with this idea while thinking about the fact that Shakespeare only used male actors. "Why not turn old Bill on his head, and give him a taste of his own medicine, that sexist pig!" they must have said. Nevermind that there weren't any female actors in the year 1600, just like there weren't any female lawyers or female doctors or female playwrights. Anyhoo, in the year 2004, it's kind of an interesting idea. But I don't think I would have endorsed it.

Call me traditionalist or racist or sexist or whatever, but I am of the opinion that the casting for a play should correspond fairly closely to the characters. That is, men should play men. Women should play women. Blacks should play blacks. Old people should play old people. Fat people should not play thin and beautiful people. Blondes should play blondes. Part of the point of the theater is that the actors should look like their characters. Claudio, in our performance, was not only a woman, but a black woman at that. In 1600s Italy? I'm all about the suspension of disbelief, and I was even able to do a reasonable job with Claudio (she acted and spoke very manly), but if you're going to cast an actor who looks so little like the character she's playing, why even bother dressing her up in Elizabethan costume?

I saw a production of "King Lear" once, where one of Lear's daughters was played by a deaf actress. She couldn't speak, so she signed all her lines and another actor (a man) followed her around and spoke her lines as she signed them. It was excrutiatingly distracting. I could never get over the weirdness of this dude, invisible to the other characters, standing right there, saying what this girl is supposed to be saying. It's a different thing in, say, "The Lion King," where you have "invisible" actors manipulating puppets that actually constitute the characters. The whole point of "The Lion King" is the puppets and the set pieces and the abstract, non-realistic portrayal of animals and the African savannah. It didn't work in "King Lear."

However, the "King Lear" concept, expanded, did work in a production of "Big River" I saw on Broadway a summer ago. In this production, half the cast was deaf, and all the actors, deaf and hearing, signed all of their lines. The deaf actors had, as did Lear's daughter, another actor who spoke their lines as they signed--sometimes on the wings of the stage, sometimes following behind them, and in the case of Pap, physically interacting with them in a mirror-like choreography that was one of the highlights of the show. It was a little weird to get used to at first, but once you accepted the premise that this would be a signed show, it added a whole new dimension to the songs and the story. This was by far my favorite theater experience of my life. The signing literally made the words dance before our eyes. The songs moved your spirit because they literally moved. You could see the expression as well as hear it. It was a whole new sensory level. It worked so much better than "King Lear," perhaps, because every actor was doing it. Everyone was signing and half of them had proxy speakers. It became a whole new element to the show, and I loved it.

So, if that's the criterion, then "Much Ado" should have worked, right? Everyone on the whole stage was a woman, so it should have provided some additional heightened feeling to the show. Well, not so much. I did get used to it after a while. It was possible to forget for a moment that the genders of the actors and the characters don't match up. The women who played men walked and talked like men, and it was only in moments of awkwardness that their gender really became apparent. (When Benedic and Beatrice were in a position that could have led to a kiss, they drew closer, I cringed, and the lady standing next to me whispered, "Please don't kiss." Benedic swiftly turned his face to the audience, winked, we breathed a sigh of relief, and they hugged.)

One moment was improved by the all female cast, though. When Claudio has wronged Hero and Beatrice wants revenge, she and Benedic have a discussion in which she cries, "Oh that I were a man!" She wants to be a man so she can challenge and kill Claudio for shaming her cousin. Women in that time and place couldn't do such things. Benedic, a man, is hesitant to do so, but agrees for love of Beatrice. But in our production, Benedic was not a man. Beatrice is imploring a woman to do what she thinks of as a man's work. I'm not sure exactly what interpretation to give this--perhaps you could say that women today are liberated and can do men's work. Maybe it's calling attention to the fact that although Benedic is a man, he doesn't want to call Claudio out. I don't know. But it did make me think.

And after all, isn't that what we go to the theater for?

Editor's Note: Sorry for the long essay. And so much for "travel writing." That became theater criticism.