My Ashland adventure started at the outdoor Elizabethan Stage, for an enchanting production of As You Like It. Directed by Jessica Thebus, the staging makes beautiful use of the performance arena. There is no play of Shakespeare’s better for an outdoor setting. The light changes from day to evening, the sparkle of the stars are perfectly in tune with the music of the verse and the world of the Forest of Arden. Thebes did a marvelous job bringing it all together.
The story is well told. From the moment the great wheel of time begins to turn, (a marvel by set designer Todd Rosenthal), the harmonies of the four seasons lull us into the world of Shakespeare’s comedy of love and the sensual draw of mother nature. An inventive prologue rendered the necessary exposition with absolute clarity, and we grasp the clash between two battling Dukes, and the bond between their two daughters. Erica Sullivan’s Rosalind is a nimble and elegant woman, nervy in her own way, as she must be to accept banishment from her Uncle’s court and try to pass as a young man in the forest. Her Rosalind is a young woman caught in the caprice of disguise. Love and freedom are at her fingertips, but she is gloved and hidden behind her earnest masculinity. Hers and Celia’s survival is foremost in her mind. Still, when the forest of Arden becomes instantly draped with the love poems of Orlando, Rosalind becomes absolutely struck by love…she is powerless over her longing. Wayne T. Carr’s Orlando is a more than worthy match for Sullivan’s fervor. Orlando is fueled by the need for justice, and the courage a young man must have when he strikes out on his own, much maligned by his brother and mourning the premature passage of his father. Carr’s Orlando is beyond handsome, quick witted, brave and compassionate. His care for his family’s loyal and aging servant Adam (an endearing Douglas Rowe), makes clear his determination to honor the past while seeking his own future. Rosalind’s bedfellow and beloved cousin Celia is played by the terrific Christine Albright. Celia is often sketched two dimensionally as dimwitted, but Albright was having none of that stereotype. Her Celia is the truly brave one of the sisterhood. When she tells Rosalind that her banishment means Celia’s banishment as well, you want to cheer her for her loyalty and for making the whole adventure to Arden possible in the first place.
Though all of the designs are marvelous, including bewitching original music by composer Andre J. Pluess, I must give special kudos to costume designer Linda Roethke. Her imaginative costumes are a brilliant amalgam of Elizabethan silhouettes and style, with a fanciful sort of Alice-in-Wonderlandia audacity. I audibly gasped at the inventiveness of the twin dresses worn by Rosalind and Celia at court. Those fabulous frocks were gloriously cylindrical, and a corporeal challenge the ladies share with us in an unforgettable moment of physical comedy.
Every actor in this ensemble shines with professionalism, inventiveness, mirth, and the clearest speech as any of the best Shakespeare actors in America. Special salutes to Peter Frechette, who plays Touchstone, the court fool who must follow his mistress into the forest, where he too, will find his very human lust, if not his love. Frechette carves Touchstone’s space out with a razor blade of wit and audacity. Another kind of clear speech is required when the text is not English. Howie Seago, known for his work internationally in the Deaf Theatre community and at OSF as an actor for whom there are no limits in expression, plays the banished Duke Senior. His Duke lives in tune with nature, and the silent eloquence of his signed language, with voicings by his follower Amiens (Rodney Gardiner), carries the sensibilities of a man who has left the city behind only to find a simpler and truer life. All of the actors in this company makes Shakespeare’s language an entirely accessible kind of expression.
Music is integrated throughout the play and as sunset transforms the light of the sky behind the players, this universal language can help us to understand how nature can transform us from within, so that we, as audiences, can also “hear” the call of the forest, and if we are lucky, of true love as well.
If all this isn’t enough to make you want to see As You LIke It, let me just add that longtime OSF company member John Pribyl offers the character of the courtier Le Beau with the highest style of foppification that is possible within the realm of (a miraculous) subtlety. His performance is worth the price of the ticket.
Shakespeare’s As You Like It, directed by Jessica Thebes, sets by Todd Rosenthal, Costumes by Linda Roethke, Lights by Jane Cox, Composer and sound deisgner Andre J. Pluess. Dramaturgy by Lezlie Cross and Choregraphy by Sarah Goldberg, performed at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s outdoor Elizabethan Stage through November 4th. Go to www.osfashland.org for calendar and tickets.