Love’s Labor’s Lost

CAST

King Ferdinand ………………….. Collins Wilson
Dumain/Nathaniel ….. Caleb van Doornewaard
Longaville/Holofernes ………… Cole Goodnight
Berowne ……………………………..….. Ben Apple
Costard/Boyet ………………..….. Mason Cordell
Dull/Katherine ……………………… Zoe Matney
Don Adriano de Armado ……….…. Liz Howard
Moth ……………………………………. Zoe Wright
Jacquenetta/Maria ……….. Cassidy Petrykowski
Princess of France …………………… Maya Noor
Rosaline ………………….... Jacqueline Nunweiler

If Shakespeare were on TikTok in 2025, he might have thought that the #75hardchallenge sounded a little familiar: an intensive set of rules designed for extreme personal improvement – and most important of all, a dictate to take and post progress photos every day so the whole world can see your #glowup. Love’s Labor’s Lost’s King Ferdinand and his lords Berowne, Dumain and Longaville were hitting that #grindset before it was cool. (If your birth year starts with a 19, Grind = hard work, and grindset = Grind + Mindset.)

For a 400-year old play, LLL holds the mirror up to our modern social media culture exceptionally well. The court of Navarre is a place where appearances are everything, especially when one’s carefully-curated public image is at odds with the heart’s true desires.

As we explored the text in rehearsal, we found Shakespeare’s world and our own colliding in hilarious and oftentimes unexpected ways, truly proving a maxim that has always been at the heart of our work at Scrap Paper Shakespeare: Shakespeare doesn’t need to be “modernized” via imposed concepts so much as it needs to be allowed to live and breathe and grow today through our unique voices and contexts.

I like to say that working on Shakespeare is much like working on a new play – I am constantly in conversation with the playwright, constantly pushing the text to evolve through rehearsal – it’s just that that conversation happens via analyzing original sources and reading critical theory and maybe the occasional séance rather than Gmail.

And of course, I have to mention the ending of the play – no spoilers, but for me it’s the moment that makes the whole show worth producing. It’s an ending that leaves you wanting more, leaves you questioning the conventions of comedy as a genre, and points back once more to the question at the heart of our production: in the conflict between perfected images and messy reality, to which version of yourself will you be true?