This will be disjointed. I’d like to make these more thematically coherent, but sometimes the ideas come in ways that defy easy through lines. Take each bit as a snippet of what’s going through my head at the moment in terms of As You Like It.
Circumstances is the name of the game. I’m examining the play from various angles and seeing what crops up as potentially dramaturgically useful in ways I didn’t expect.
WHY THIS/WHY NOW - As You Like It is one of Shakespeare’s most performed comedies (for the record, is there ANY Shakespearean Comedy that hasn’t really been done to exhaustion? Maybe The Comedy of Errors, but I defy you to locate a single actually funny joke in that play that you haven’t heard better in another context). In reviving the comedies, you have to have very clear, very specific reasons on why this play/why now. As a company, you’ll burn through producing them, thinking you’re doing the crowd pleasers, and they begin to blend together and suddenly you’re just doing the same comedy five or six times when they are VASTLY different plays. I REALLY hesitate about directing another comedy without first figuring out what makes this play different and what makes this play tick. And I don’t think I’ve solved it, but I think I’ve chosen a series of tools that will help me solve it.
So why As You Like It in New York City in 2009?
I want to do a show about Americana, about American identity, about what divides us and what unites us in ways we didn’t except, about self-determinism, and to see if I can make jaded, ironic young New Yorkers feel a patriotic fervor and sense of national pride about the purple mountains majesties, fruited plains, and the music that was written about them.
I’ve talked in the past about me and Berger developing this in various forms over the last year or so. We began discussing setting it in the ’30s before the recession hit, and now, a world in which people are cast to the wind without their creature comforts or money or homes and are forced to fight for what they need seems relevant almost to the point of redundancy. Also, it seems too useful to pass up.
THE ’30s - I’ve begun to think of it not as a play about the ’30s or that can simply use the ’30s as a means of clarifying the story; but as a play that features intense moments of generosity AND craven greed that are particular to extreme times, and setting it in the ’30s with its images of the dust bowl, a stark difference in economic status, displaced families, flourishing gangsters and “fat cat” capitalists, world travelling Marxists, and an overwhelming sense of curiosity about what it means to be American seem perfectly suited to my feelings about As You Like It.
I want to talk about red state/blue state, what it means to have national pride, a particular type of American exceptionalism and individualism, and the ’30s provide me with enough Americana, cultural touchstones, and fierce sense of human NEED that can emotionally ground what is often thought of as Shakespeare’s wittiest (hate that word and all its implications of delicacy and winking) comedy.
ALL THE WORLDS A STAGE - I want Jaques’s “All the world’s a stage” to be more than a set speech and the bit when people go “oh yeah i’ve heard this, how’ll this guy do it, and I’ve probably seen better.” I want it to be a statement about how the world and life REALLY work from someone who believes they’ve figured it out. And if Jaques seems like a young Marxist or radical that helps all the more.
THE TITLE - The title derives from Rosalind’s epilogue where she tells the audience to like as much of the play as it pleases them. And I think that implies a certain meta-theatrical awareness of the convenience of some of the plotting (the off-stage tiger fight, Orlando/Rosalind and Oliver/Celia falling instantaneously in love with each other. Orlando miraculously arriving in the same forest as Rosalind AND her father. The Evil Duke’s sudden religious conversion), and the catch-as-catch-can nature of the scenes in the second half.
Also many of the scenes in the second half, especially Touchstone/Audrey’s, seem almost like vaudevillian sketches with a different comedic cameo each time. The title As You Like It seems to be saying, “take what you will (BLAM. See what I did there?) from the evening and the moments you’re watching. Form your own opinions and conclusions. You may not like our rules, this isn’t a well-made play, but it is an energetic and beautiful one.” It’s such a pragmatic “take-it-or-leave-it” phrase. It’s fascinating me because I don’t have a simple, non-glib answer that I’d be comfortable talking about in a rehearsal room.
FAMILIES - We have three families in states of distress/dysfunction. The De Boys - 3 brothers, no parents. Duke Frederick/Celia - Father and a suddenly rebellious and disapproving daughter. Duke Senior/Rosalind - Obviously affection/functional father and daughter who are undergoing a forced separation.
I’ll talk about with the one I’m currently fascinated with, since it begins the play and must provide us with the engine necessary to the evening. As we had discussed in the reading in October, the “danger” of the exile in the woods seems to be what will happen to Orlando if Oliver gets his hands on him. So lets think about where we start, and what that seems to imply.
THE DE BOYS have no parents; their father having passed relatively recently. I get the sense from the text that the new dynamics of the family are not set in stone as of yet. Oliver as surrogate father for his two younger brothers. They have someone who appears to have been their Steward - Adam; though when he interacts with Oliver/Orlando he is definitely in a servile position.
OLIVER - The “responsible” older child trying to keep things together (in the case of our production probably the family business of some sort) and “parent” his younger brothers - i.e. Oliver’s decision to educate Jaques while keeping Orlando at home. His line to Orlando “be better employed and be naught awhile” to me implies that he’s protecting his brother from the realities of working and worry, and his decision to keep Orlando from study, etc comes from a place of helping. His switch to absolute hatred of his brother comes from what happens in the first scene (being physically and verbally abused by Orlando, cut down to size). He’s a man of importance, and Orlando transforms him in those moments into simply a brother. I feel this same sudden regression in years and maturity whenever I’m around my sisters on the holidays. Old dynamics die hard.
ORLANDO - Orlando is the youngest and of course has the same desires to establish himself as an individual, separate from the choices his brothers have made. He’s hungry to make his name, to set out and find who he is. His home life is stifling him and he wants whats his and the freedom to make his own mistakes.
JAQUES DE BOYS - All we know of him is he left school to venture to Arden, presumably to find the exiled Duke and tell him of his regaining of his lands and status. I feel as if he doesn’t notice he’s inadvertently interrupted his brothers’ wedding until the exiled Duke points it out. And Phebe will probably fall instantaneously in love with him. Maybe.
THE ENDING - The end is something I’ve been thinking about a lot, and it occurs to me that Jaques De Boys is an absolute game-changer. I think I’m going to cast an actor as Jaques who we never see before his entrance. I’m thinking back to Love’s Labours Lost and the figure of Marcade (in our production it was a telephone call that Jaquenetta received, and then she spoke his lines) who arrives and changes the entire dynamic of the end scene - the princess’s father has died and she must immediately return to France, putting an abrupt end to the wooing and merriment of the play. The lovers must then listen to a song originally meant to be a celebration of happiness that now takes on an almost bitter connotation because of the changed circumstances.
In As You Like It, Jacques arrives and re-crowns the Duke, something the Duke might now be perfectly happy to go without. The Duke seems to be flourishing in the wild, free from the in’s and out’s of the court. So as happy as he is to be returning to life as normal, it colors this last rustic moment they all share together. These people who fell in love in this forest with these people must now translate that love back to life in the court. Think of the times you’ve dated someone in the same show/class/camp/etc as you, and how that dynamic changes the moment things return to normal. It highlights these last moments in the forest and in exile as the end of the idle fun we’ve had there, where we could see what we want in life so easily when the worries of everyday life are stripped away.
Rosalind warns Orlando, while dressed as Ganymede, that she has a lot of baggage, will be an absolute handful, and will probably cheat with the pool boy. Oliver is gloriously alive in the forest in a way he isn’t when he has the worries (and threats from the Duke) at home. Not to mention Touchstone now bringing defiantly slutty Audrey back to the court he loves, and how that’ll cause absolute chaos for his social standing. And all the sadness and bizarreness that is Silvius/Phebe.
Like all the comedies, you search for the acid moments; the moments that highlight the opposite of the fun we’re having, the emotional and psychological and societal implications of the character’s actions. I’m having fun finding the twists and unresolved contradictions.
Breathes. Takes a sip of water. Decides to leave it be for the moment.
—Steve