As I Did and Didn't Like It

The "Shakespeare" label on this site suggests that in my time reviewing theatre here, I've written about a total of 14 plays by William Shakespeare, at least four of them more than once.  (That's including North Coast Prep's editing of several Henry history plays into Mortal Men, Mortal Men, but does not include productions of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) [Revised], Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, I Hate Hamlet or Equivocation.

I wrote about some Oregon Shakespeare Festival productions, but coincidentally, not about Shakespeare plays that didn't also have North Coast productions at some point.  These were played at HSU, Dell'Arte, Shake the Bard at Arcata Playhouse, and Plays in the Park, but mostly at North Coast Repertory Theatre, which has the courage and commitment to produce a Shakespeare play nearly every season.

I enjoyed the opportunity to research these plays--to read them again, to read about them, to look at filmed or taped productions or actual movies made from them, and to recall productions I'd seen before.  This informed my viewing and reviewing, and gave me plenty more to write about on this site.  I am pleased to leave that for others to find on the Internet.

But I was often reminded that the audience for any given production would include at least some people who had never seen this particular Shakespeare play before, and may never have seen any.  This included adults as well as children and students.  More than once I've heard someone announce this fact in the North Coast Rep lobby.

After one show I was walking on the sidewalk in front of the theatre when a police car stopped, and the police officer inside asked me a question that I wasn't expecting: how was it?  Meaning the play--I don't remember which, but it was Shakespeare.  I stammered something to the effect of "good."  "Maybe I'll see it," he said, in a way that suggested to me that it's something he'd thought about before, but had not yet done.

People do go to see Shakespeare plays they've seen before, perhaps several times.  Why?  I don't think people go again for the same reason that producers and directors seem to feel they do--to see what new way this production has contrived to do the play.  Will it be a gender-flipped Hamlet on the Moon?  Or (as I suggested in an April Fool's piece) Othello set in the 2001 Los Angeles Lakers locker room, (retitled Shaqthello)  or a Macbeth recounting bloody competition among burl sculptors in Orick in the 1980s, with music by Devo, Cyndi Lauper and the Cars?

I think people go again and again, not for novelty, but because there is so much to see and hear.  The language is both more elaborate and compacted than we are used to, and there is a lot of it.  You notice something and you've already missed something else.  That's one of many reasons that clarity--vocal clarity especially--is crucial.  You never know which lines are going to jump out at individual audience members.

Appreciation is partly cumulative.  You look for different things, you hear different things. Different productions also emphasize different aspects of the play.  Actors offer different interpretations.  Sometimes (and the Shakespeare playgoer lives for this) the production and/or the actors make discoveries, that they make clear to you.

But as long as the words and actions are clear, you don't absolutely need that.  You make your own discoveries.  This happens in the moment.  But it can happen with some preparation--recalling prior productions, or having read about the play and other productions.  You might see how something is done differently this time, how some problem is solved.  So in many ways, every production--and to some extent, every performance--is new.

I've even written in this space about plays I haven't seen here, notably Hamlet and Macbeth.  I missed the Hamlet James Floss directed at NCRT, which was a year or two before I started writing Stage Matters.  I've mentioned  the first Hamlet I saw, which was the first Shakespeare I ever saw on stage, a few months after I started college.  It's a theatrical truism that your first Hamlet remains your favorite, and that's certainly true in my case.  But I've recently re-read the director's essay on it, and I can see why I loved it.

The first Shakespeare I saw in any medium I'm pretty sure was a Studio One television production of Julius Caesar when I was 11.  It helped that it's a fairly simple plot that I could follow, but I was otherwise enchanted by the language, even if I couldn't understand a lot of it.  That enchantment remains.

By the time I went to college I probably had also seen Olivier's Henry V on black and white TV.  Still, I was bowled over by it when I saw it years later in color, screened one Sunday afternoon at a small town art museum.  These experiences began an eagerness to see Shakespeare on film and television.  Apart from seeing some great actors, the verse is at least audible--and at home there's rewind.  But you do lose the sense of the whole stage, and the whole theatre, including the audience.  That particular sense of presence.

I've also written here on Macbeth-- that tragedy of rash decisions in which the action turns on the key character of the Thane of Ross.  And I'm not saying that just because I happened to play the Thane of Ross in a college production.  (Duncan was played by Richard Hoover, whose later fame came as a set designer for Twin Peaks and other Hollywood productions.)

Okay, that is why I said it, and it's probably not true.  But oddly,  for a play that is produced so often, I have seen Macbeth mostly on film. I've only encountered one stage production other than the one I was in (it starred Christopher Plummer and Glenda Jackson, and it wasn't very good).  Of course, you can learn a lot about a play that way.

Macbeth is scheduled to be produced at NCRT in early 2015, and so it will be the first North Coast Shakespeare production in nine years I won't have the opportunity to review. The participants may not be lamenting this.  My point of view on producing Shakespeare is that with great plays comes great responsibility.  I've been harder on Shakespeare productions than the rest, although (like Shakespeare himself perhaps) I became more generous towards the end.

My first real pan came fairly early, of the first Shakespeare I reviewed.  Because it was my favorite of the comedies, and because I had seen a stage production and a few on film that were wonderful in part, and I knew the play so well, I was looking forward to this show.  Perhaps too much.

 Anyway that review caused a mild kerfuffle, which both scared and delighted my editors.  It was then that somebody told me that previous reviewers in town had been unceremoniously sacked if a theatre (I think the expression was "community theatre") complained about a review.  (I was later assured privately that  the community theatre in which this production appeared had no problem with my review.)

So at the risk of opening old wounds, I am reproducing that review here.  Consider it in the abstract (made easier by the fact that even at the time I didn't name any names), as a point of view on the perils and opportunities of producing Shakespeare, or of going to see a Shakespeare play.

Next time--and for this retrospective, it will be the last time--I will include the Stage Matters column I wrote after this one, responding to the response.

As I Didn't Like It    2006

In Truth and the Comedic Art, Michael Gelven calls As You Like It “one of the rarest few of the greatest comedies ever written.” A Midsummer Night’s Dream is funnier, he believes, and Much Ado About Nothing is wittier. But As You Like It “seems to fuse love with comedy almost to perfection.”

That’s how I feel about it. It’s my favorite of the comedies.

 Shakespeare wrote for a particular group of actors and the audience of the time. Romances were in style and the cross-town rivals of Shakespeare’s company had a recent success with a Robin Hood play. So he adapted a popular romance, and created a band of exiles in the Forest of Arden, infusing the conventional story with a wide and wonderful humanity.

 This is one of Shakespeare’s most performed plays. Rosalind, the woman who pretends to be a man, who then pretends to be a woman so that Orlando (the man she loves) can practice wooing the woman she actually is by pretending he is she, is perhaps the greatest woman’s part in the comedies. Famous actors have therefore pined to play her, from Dame Edith Evans to Katharine Hepburn, Maggie Smith and Gwyneth Paltrow, with Vanessa Redgrave’s 1961 Royal Shakespeare Company performance among the most lauded.

 It’s been done for television several times, with the 1978 BBC version of the full play (starring Helen Mirren) available on DVD. A 1936 movie abridgement can be found on video, notable for a young and dazzling Lawrence Olivier as Orlando, and some creative film editing by the young David Lean. Elizabeth Bergner, an accomplished Central European actress, plays a spirited Rosalind, though her accent sounds disconcertingly like Bela Lugosi.

 Later this year, As You Like It will get the Kenneth Branagh film treatment, starring two young actors with strong theatre credentials who are becoming movie stars: Bryce Dallas Howard as Rosalind, and Adrian Lester as Orlando.

 This is a rich and accessible history, for those who make and those who go to new productions. Every local company that does a well-known play has to compete to some degree with the best stage productions as well as existing films and videos. It’s unfair, but a reality, as is the justice of being judged.  Even when the players aren’t paid, they are often asking audiences to spend their money as well as several hours of their lives.

 Sometimes, as in the case of North Coast Rep’s last production, Once Upon A Mattress, they create something that’s better than the pros. Mostly they offer other virtues, the most basic of which is the privilege of seeing a good or a great play up close, when it’s done competently, with at least a few intriguing or pleasingly surprising elements.

 This in my view is unfortunately not the case with NCRT’s current production of As You Like It. Some directors have played it strictly for laughs, even as farce, which seems to be the intended direction of this attempt. Even when done reasonably well, this approach tramples on the play’s greatest virtues. As Michael Gelven observes (and I heartily agree), the central characteristic of this play and its characters is grace.

 But even on its own terms, I didn’t find this production anywhere near a minimal standard of watchability. On a nearly bare stage, it is set in a confused and unappealing version of the 1960s, with Beatles songs replacing those in the text, inflicting only slightly less damage on the Beatles than on Shakespeare.

 The acting style is apparently meant to be broadly funny, somewhere between sitcom and camp. It doesn’t work, as the lack of laughter from Friday’s audience made terribly clear. The only Shakespearian element of the acting is from Hamlet’s advice to the players on what not to do: mug the words and saw the air too much with the hands. Those who didn’t mumble went to elaborate lengths to act out their lines with stock gestures and motiveless moves that were likely antique in Shakespeare’s day.

 At times it all came across as laboriously condescending, both to the play and to the audience. The blocking was awkward, the costumes seemed deliberately ugly (likely somebody’s idea of a hoot), and the almost non-existent set was perfunctory at best.

 I wish there was an element of the production I could single out for praise, apart from the assumed sincere effort. I hold out for you the possibility that everything changed for the better in the second half, for I was long gone by then.

 It’s especially unfortunate, if my view has merit, because this comedy should have special appeal to Humboldt, particularly in the multiple contrasts of country and city. Think of it set in the Forest of Arcata. And be grateful that your happy memories (if such they be) of “The Long and Winding Road” remain intact.

Stage on Film

Bryce Dallas Howard as Rosalind and David Oyelowo
as Orlando in "As You Like It" on DVD, an HBO
film directed by Kenneth Branagh.

Branagh's "As You Like It"

With Henry V in 1989, Kenneth Branagh burst onto the world cinema scene as a combination Orson Welles (theatre enfant terrible who directs and stars in his first major film while in his twenties) and Laurence Olivier (choosing the same play as Olivier did for his first of several director/star Shakespeare flicks, to become Shakespeare’s foremost cinematic interpreter of his time.)

Branagh brought a strong visual sense and cinematic storytelling, combined with an accessible acting style. For my money, his best Shakespeare was his second, Much Ado About Nothing (1993.) A remarkable title sequence, Branagh’s easy but compelling way with the verse, the sparks flying between him and a sparkling Emma Thompson, and Denzel Washington in Shakespeare are just some of the highlights.

Then after warming up with a bracing if unknown comedy about another actor doing Hamlet (A Midwinter’s Tale, 1995), he directed and starred in his big screen Hamlet in 1996, and pulled out all the stops, filming the long version of the text for a 4 hour movie.

It won awards and may yet be judged the definitive film version, but in budgets and buzz, it’s been a downward slope for Branagh’s Shakespearian efforts ever since. His oddly charming Love Labour’s Lost (done as a kind of 1930s musical) died at the box office in 2000, ending his plans to do Macbeth and postponing his next comedy, As You Like It for five years. Originally meant to be a big screen feature, it’s played in the U.S. only on HBO before being released on DVD, just recently available for rental locally.

At first, it may seems that Branagh is indulging in the latest fad of heedlessly transplanting Shakespeare to bizarre times and places. Branagh’s Forest of Arden is set in 19th century Japan, even though ironically enough, it was filmed in an English wood. But this does little harm (most of the characters come from a settlement of European traders) and sharpens the play’s meaning in at least one obvious way (a wrestling match that’s important to the plot but hard to make credible becomes more theatrical and dangerous when a Sumo master is involved) and in one more subtle theme: there are a couple of religious conversions in the story that seem absurd to modern audiences, unacquainted with the Christian contemplative tradition, but they probably make more sense to us when they involve Buddhist monks.

Some people despise this play, and this film is unlikely to change their minds. But since As You Like It is my favorite Shakespeare comedy, I also have a high standard. It’s visually beautiful: shots of the forest are appropriately enchanting. Bryce Dallas Howard (now better known as Gwen Stacy in Spiderman 3) is convincing and exciting in the key role of Rosalind—it’s easy to see why she caused such a stir when she played it on stage in New York. Her scenes with David Oyelowo as Orlando, and with an ardent Romola Garai as Celia, in the first half of the film are magical. There are excellent performances by Alfred Molina as Touchstone, Brian Blessed as both the good and bad Dukes, Richard Briers as Orlando’s loyal servant, and Kevin Kline as Jacques. Until…

Branagh’s strange, distant, almost embarrassed approach to Jacques’ “all the world’s a stage” speech, and Kline’s mumbled delivery, is deflating. Then the movie falters in other places, losing its magic spell in the second half. There are still crisp, funny performances by pretty much the whole cast, good scenes and striking images, but the film didn’t fulfill the promise of the early scenes, and it ends with a pale imitation of the passionate dancing that ended Much Ado About Nothing with some embarrassing singing, plus a postmodern coda that falls equally flat. (Branagh doesn’t appear in the film at all, though his voice is the last to be heard—saying “cut.”)

To call it the best film version of this play isn’t saying much—the runner up is a rarely seen 1936 version co-written by J. M. Barrie and featuring a very young Laurence Olivier in his first film role. Fans of the play—and those who have to study it—may find much of the acting illuminates the characters, and a lot of the typical problems of staging the play are neatly solved (even if a lot of the text is missing.)  Most impressive: the Duke suddenly becoming a holy man after a chance conversation with a clergyman always seemed a stretch to me.  But by setting the play in Japan, the Duke meets a Buddhist monk, and such a re-dedication seems much more credible.

Despite my disappointments, Branagh at his best can still merge Shakespeare with screen entertainment. I’ll see this one again.

As You Like It

In As You Like It at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival:
Before they are exiled: Miriam A. Laube as Rosalind, Julie
Oda as Celia and Brad Whitmore, the bad Duke who deposed his brother--
one of two pairs of brothers (Orlando and Oliver being the
other) at odds in the beginning, but reconciled in the Forest.
These mostly offstage and far-fetched reconciliations are
signaled early when one of these brothers admits that to do
violence on a brother is "unnatural." A key moment I'd
missed until this production.

As of this week, William Shakespeare is 443 years old, and he’s still making news. Without looking for it, I saw his name on the cover of at least three periodicals on the magazine rack at Northtown Books. This birthday sees a new edition of his Complete Works, and several new books, including one I already admire, Shakespeare the Thinker by the late A.D. Nuttall. Shakespeare Inside describes the impact of his plays performed in prisons.

 There’s been a steady stream of new film interpretations, and the burgeoning Shakespeare industry inspired a wonderful TV series from Canada, “Sling and Arrows.” Shakespeare still fascinates audiences, and despite the perils of producing his plays, directors and actors continue to take on the challenge because there is so much to learn and experience.

 Of our established community and college theatres here, only North Coast Repertory Company regularly produces Shakespeare, a commitment not only admirable in itself, but valuable to the entire local theatre community. I was disappointed to see that mine was the only review of their recent Henry IV Part 1. Without broader and deeper dialogue, we’re missing a continuing opportunity that these great plays and their rich theatrical history provide.

 We are most fortunate to be only hours from one of the few theatres on the continent to regularly offer world class productions of Shakespeare. At the Oregon Shakespeare Festival right now there’s a production of one of the Bard’s best: As You Like It. 

Moving Shakespeare’s plays to different places and historical periods has become a fashion, with mixed results. It works when it illuminates the play, and it’s even better if both play and the era illuminate each other. The OSF production (directed by J.R. Sullivan) is set in early 1930s America, or more precisely, in the version we know from Hollywood movies. Those movie images quickly communicate important elements like power relationships—when Orlando (the younger son of a deceased nobleman) is working on a loading dock, and his gangster-like boss is his older brother, Oliver, we get it immediately.

 This theatricality, together with the energy it engenders on stage, emphasizes clarity, an OSF hallmark, further encouraged by this production’s participation in a National Endowment of the Arts initiative called “Shakespeare for a New Generation.” The theatre was filled with responsive young people when we saw it. They were even laughing at 400 year old jokes.

 You know the story: Orlando and Rosalind fall for each other, both are exiled from the court to the Forest of Arden by the Evil Duke, where they find the Good Duke and each other. Disguised as a boy, Rosalind tutors the clueless Orlando on how to win his lady. In the enchanted wild, order is eventually restored, brothers are reconciled with brothers, and just about everybody gets married.

 When I saw this play at the Pittsburgh Public Theater, I was impressed by the fierce energy of Monica Bell as Rosalind. (Julie Oda, who played the country girl Audrey in that production, plays Rosalind’s companion Celia at OSF.)

 At OSF, Miriam Laube had lots of energy, but her portrayal was edgier, more ambiguous. She played to the audience maybe a bit too much, but what impressed me most was that she often seemed to be doing what Rosalind was doing: improvising, making it up as she goes along.

 The 1930s “concept” didn’t often impinge on the integrity of the scenes or the acting and especially the text. Though there was no obvious new interpretation, I heard lines echo with each other in ways I hadn’t heard before.

 Even though the plot and much of the action can seem silly, this is a deceptively profound play. The character who gets no respect from play analysts is Orlando. Because Rosalind drives much of the action, he is dismissed as a somewhat dim hero.

 Yet the play begins with his problem: not that his brother has robbed him of his monetary inheritance, but of his birthright of nobility. “You have trained me like a peasant, obscuring and hiding from me all gentlemanlike qualities.”

 This is where the theme of the court (or the city) versus nature (or the country) begins, and the resolution of it in the Forest of Arden is Orlando’s education. The court is courtly, the country is rude—until he learns that “gentleness” or civility (a word that comes from the same root as “city”) is also natural.

 Many of Shakespeare’s plays dramatize the evil that humans do, almost always in the “artificial” world of courts and nations. In Arden, it is brotherly love as well as sexual love that is natural in the wild. The natural is revealed through artifice—song, jest, thought, Rosalind’s playacting and above all, imagination. Seeing through the eyes of others, imagining yourself in someone else’s shoes, is the beginning of empathy, and the beginning of humanity. In this odd way, As You Like It is a kind of key to all of Shakespeare’s work, and perhaps to more than that.

Will in the Wild continued: As You Like It

In honor of Shakespeare's birthday this week, I've got a series of posts about the play, As You Like It, and specifically the current production at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland.

(Following these posts are a couple concerning the Canadian comedy series about producing Shakespeare (Slings and Arrows), a new book on Shakespeare's plays, and a short recollection of Shakespeare birthdays past.)

As You Like It has been called"one of the rarest few of the greatest comedies ever written" (Michael Gelven, Truth and the Comedic Art) and "the greatest pastoral in the English language" (A.D. Nuttall in Shakespeare the Thinker.) While these may not be majority views, I subscribe to them.

Let me borrow from my review of the OSF production to summarize the story: Orlando and Rosalind fall for each other, both are separately exiled from the court to the Forest of Arden (she by the Evil Duke, he by his evil brother) where they find the Good Duke and each other. Disguised as a boy, Rosalind tutors the clueless Orlando on how to win his lady. In the enchanted wild, order is eventually restored, brothers are reconciled with brothers, and just about everybody gets married.

The OSF production moves the action from 16th century France to 1930s America. In my column and in some of the "gallery" captions below, I discuss ramifications of this. But let's specify here as well that the time and place Shakespeare chose is at best vague, and perhaps even mythical. The real Forest of Arden was in England, for example--very close to where Shakespeare was born. So in principle there's nothing wrong with changing locations, but in practice it is often dangerous. The relevant questions are: What is gained? And what is lost?

In my column I discussed what is gained: mostly an easy identification of some of the power relationships and other aspects of the play from what audiences know about the early 1930s as portrayed in the movies: Al Capone, Okies, etc. But what I want to mention here is what is lost. The oppositions in the play are the court versus the wilderness, which means not only the forest but the country, with its farming and herding. The court thinks of itself as civilized, and the country as an uncivilized "desert." But the country folk view the court as dishonest, artificial and snobbish.

There's some sense of this in the American opposition of the period (and its fictions and films) between city and country: the city slicker versus the rural rube. But in Shakespeare there is much more to it. There is a deep theme here of where true civilization exists, in what Shakespeare calls "gentleness." (Shakespeare used the word more than any other known writer of his time.) Gentleness as in "gentleman": courtly manners that include kindness to the weak and the young, fairness to others, generosity, understanding, and romantic (or "courtly") love itself.

These oppositions are in the lines throughout the play. They are even in the contrast of Fools--the court Fool, an "artificial" fool who uses the pretense of being silly and not right in the head, versus the "natural" fool, who in the extreme would be the truly addled, as well as the congenitally different ("little people" for example), but in general could be construed as the basic country bumpkin. Touchstone is the artificial fool (and so in a different way is Jacques, the melancholy philosopher) while William is the natural fool. And both of them have ongoing subplots that comically pose the question of who is really a fool.

This particular opposition comes down to us as the distinction between "comedian" (the verbal descendant of the artificial Fool, or Jester) and "clown" (the name refers to cloddish country bumpkins and their awkward behavior.) But within this play, the differences refer to true value. Neither court/artifical Fool or country/clown turns out to have the monopoly on virtue, or on silliness. It's the pretense of each side to believe they are perfectly in the right--always fertile for comedy. And noting this complexity, even comically (as irony or buffoonery), is very Shakespearian, and one reason we still find his characters and stories true to life.

But in this production, the irony of the court pretending to represent "gentleness" while being in the business of killing and stealing is lost when the court is represented by gangsters. Orlando's complaint at the beginning of the play that he is not being educated to express his gentle or noble qualities is also lost when it appears that he is more like Cinderella--oppressed materially and in dignity by his evil brother. So the nobility that Orlando finds in the forest and fields, both in the exiled courtiers and the rural folk, as well as perhaps in what the forest itself and their relationship to it evokes, is also diminished.

But this production has many virtues--above all, clarity. It is not extreme: neither particularly brilliant nor ever very bad. The one daring bit of action I noted was in Rosalind's encounters with Audrey, "a country wench" who the ardent William is in love with, but who takes a shine to the glossy young man Rosalind is pretending to be. There is a certain homoerotic quality to Orlando's attraction to Rosalind in her disguise as a boy. But this is the first time I saw it doubled by Rosalind appearing to be sexually excited by Audrey, even as she rejects her.

It is the overall quality of the production and its transparency that causes me to admire it and recommend it. Its theatricality connected with the audience when I saw it, and I certainly don't dismiss that. Yet it also restrained the excesses of many productions these days, such as an overabundance of physical theatre at the expense of the text (though there are some surprising comic turns.) Turning every play into a circus is not the only alternative to flat and lifeless recitations. OSF often finds a happy medium, as they do in this production.

What I hope I suggested in my column is that this play can be seen as championing the role of the imagination--of identifying, experiencing vicariously, which can lead to empathy and understanding of others, as well as more accurate self-examination. Theatre must always consider how to spark the imagination of the audience, so practical ways of doing so are important. Theatre is not theoretical.

Gallery: As You Like It

Orlando (Danforth Comins) defeating the champion wrestler,
despite the champ being encouraged by Orlando's brother to
do him harm. It's a very theatrical moment near the beginning
of the play, and is handled very well in this OSF production.
It gets the audience on Orlando's side. Then comes the first
meeting between Rosalind and Orlando, when the sparks are
supposed to immediately fly. I'm not sure that really happens
in this production, but I should remind myself and you as well
that I only saw it once, on one particular afternoon.

Gallery: As You Like It

Miriam A. Laube as Rosalind in the current Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of As You Like It. Note the shadowy leaves behind her--the simple set suggests the menace of the Forest--where Rosalind and her friend Celia are exiled. The 1930s America setting and her costume suggest the Depression hobos. At a time when the U.S. population was less than half of what it is today, more than a million men rode the rails in the early years of the Depression, riding from one town to another, with no permanent homes. Among them were some women, who often would dress as boys, pretty much like this, as self-protection.

Like other elements of the 1930s setting, though, this works in some ways, and not in others. Rosalind and Celia are exiles, and traveling as women might be dangerous, but they are also wealthy. They soon are able to buy a cottage and land. There is a big difference between a large scale Depression and some exiles playing shepherd and Robin Hood in the forest. The play is located elsewhere than in confronting that social situation.

I should mention that Laube has a distinctive voice, low enough to not only make her male disguise credible but to add colors in the most audible range for stage acting. This production, like many at OSF, features crisp, audible enunciation. Obviously important in Shakespeare--important and unfortunately unusual enough to emphasize.

Gallery: As You Like It

Miriam A. Laube as Rosalind and Danforth Comins as Orlando in the current Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of As You Like It. Though it is set in 1930s America, you can see that the two main characters, the central lovers, also look contemporary. That adds to their appeal, especially with young audiences who can identify with them.

By making the characters look modern, there would seem to be potential for cognitive dissonance with the heightened Elizabethan language. Why there isn't is fascinating. For one thing, when the actors know what the words mean, they can convey that meaning through intonation and body language as well as with words. But the words themselves are mostly quite comprehensible, even "modern"--and that includes the lines that aren't "cliches" from being adopted into our argot and familiar quotations.

When the audience is motivated to understand the language--when they are identifying with the characters, vicariously experiencing the action, and participating in the story (wishing for things to happen, guessing what might happen, wanting to know what will happen, etc.) then they may let the beauty of the language wash through them. It can even become one of the sensuous pleasures of this experience.

Gallery: As You Like It

The OSF production is set in America in the early 1930s,
the Forest of Arden seems relocated in the Ozarks, with a
Woody Guthrie mood. Here we see Jacques (Robert Sicular)
played as a down on his luck intellectual, not unknown
in the Depression. Note the coats and hats--besides suggesting
The Grapes of Wrath, they remind us that the play begins in
winter. I was a little disappointed in Sicular's "seven ages" speech
("All the world's a stage..."). It's so familiar that it must be
difficult to make it sound new, but I felt he softened it too much.
On that afternoon anyway.

Gallery: As You Like It

One of the comic highlights of the OSF production is David Kelly
as Touchstone, the court Fool. With a look reminicent of silent
film comic Harold Lloyd, Kelly pulls off some vocal tricks, like
a speech in which he fires off a number of impressions in quick
succession, including Groucho Marx, W.C. Fields, Porky Pig
and Mae West.

Gallery: As You Like It

As You Like It is one of Shakespeare's most produced plays: from the Royal Shakespeare Company and regional theatres, to community and colleges and high school productions. It's been set in every conceivable period and place, and given many different interpretations.

There have been several post-Elizabethan all-male productions--there was one in London in the late 60s (Anthony Hopkins and Derek Jacobi were in the cast.) And Rosalind is a favorite feminist hero, as in this Playhouse on the Square production in Memphis. Director Kathleen Powers saw it as Rosalind's journey of self-discovery.

Many productions favor its festival qualities and emphasize the comedy and romance. That's probably why it's a favorite for school and summer Shakespeare in the Park productions. In fact, it's been done so much in that spirit that the more powerful and more subtle qualities of it in form and content have been in danger of being overlooked or forgotten.

It seems to me to be in fact a play that's difficult to do well. A charismatic Rosalind can do a lot to carry this play, but there is so much else going on that this is seldom enough. That's one of the wonderful things about Shakespeare's plays. There is always something more to explore and to achieve. There's always a challenge. It can always be done better.

Gallery: As You Like It

There were several TV and film versions of As You Like It--the Kenneth Branagh movie that's been finished for well over a year may yet come to U.S. theatres, or at least TV. But for all the times this play has been filmed, there aren't many versions readily available.

The 1978 BBC production is on DVD however, and it has two particular virtues: it's the whole play, and it stars Helen Mirren as Rosalind. Mirren of course won the acting Oscar this year and is like to win the Emmy, too, for playing Queens Elizabeth.

She's also considered pretty sexy, so you might imagine what she was like almost 30 years ago. Here she's Rosalind in her male disguise, a "pretty youth" with an agile mind and quick wit.

Gallery: As You Like It

This is Helen Mirren as Rosalind in the wedding scene at the end of the play, looking feminine and and sexually ardent.

Gallery: As You Like It

It's fun to imagine what the performances of famous actresses were like in the part of Rosalind--Maggie Smith, for example, or Gwyneth Paltrow, who played such an engaging Shakespearian heroine prototype in Shakespeare in Love.

But there are two that I particularly wish I'd seen. Juliet Stevenson and the legendary 1961 performance by Vanessa Redgrave. This is the only photo I could find from that production. She was in her early 20s. I remember her being so achingly beautiful in her mid to late 60s film roles (particularly her first, Morgan!, though most remember her first in Blow-Up.) Yet she was tall and thin, and with those strong features-- a lot to work with for an actor of such vitality and talent. That must have been quite a show!

Gallery: As You Like It

Rosalind in As You Like It is one of the great roles for women in Shakespeare, so nearly every star of the stage plus several of the screen have played it. One of Katharine Hepburn's first screen roles (Sylvia Scarlett) had her disguised as a man, and she would go on to play strong and independent women competing in "a man's world." So Rosalind was a natural for her.

She played the role in 1950. Though Dorothy Parker had famously described her stage acting in an earlier role as running the gamut of emotions from A to B, she apparently acquitted herself well this time. But it was this outfit that got the most attention. Kate Hepburn had not been known for gorgeous gams, so her long legs were a revelation.

Gallery: As You Like It

It was my birthday when I first saw this movie, a serendipitous appearance on a small TV in my tiny room in the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan. This 1936 film version of As You Like It was made as a starring vehicle for Elisabeth Bergner, a prominent German actor who had played the part of Rosalind in Germany, and had just won an Academy Award in 1935. So after she fled Hitler's Germany for England, this project must have seemed a natural.

It wasn't. Her heavy accent could not make up for her energy, and the production was uneven, at best. The movie is notable for a treatment by J.M. Barrie, music by William Walton, and editing by the young David Lean--but mostly as the Shakespearian film debut of Laurence Olivier. He played Orlando, the male lead, to Bergner's Rosalind. He apparently didn't enjoy making the film, and couldn't relate to Bergner in the role. (She had seen him on stage and chosen him for his part.) He felt the only way to make his character credible was to play him as a little daft.

Still, he was the perfect Orlando in some ways. Physically, he looked like he could wrestle a bigger man, and also might have the sensitivity to write love poems. But his voice, perhaps his greatest asset and best known characteristic, now and again made the part indelibly his. When Orlando comes upon the good Duke's party in the forest of Arden, threatens them with his sword to obtain food, he is told that "Your gentleness shall force more than your force move us to gentleness...Sit down and feed, and welcome to our table." I can't help but hear Olivier's voice always in Orlando's reply: "Speak you so gently? Pardon me, I pray you. I thought all things had been savage here..."

This hospitality is in fact the hallmark of civilized behavior among countless tribal peoples, and this scene is the first indication that the idea that the court is civilized while the forest is savage is wrong.

As for Olivier, although his earliest audition piece was the "Seven Ages" speech which shortly follows in this scene, as far as I can tell he never played in As You Like It on the stage.