Chris Abraham’s As You Like It has a lot more gunshot deaths than you’d expect. The director’s production on the Festival Stage in Stratford, Ontario begins a plot (which will end in a quadruple-wedding) with a group of itinerant workers laboring under firearm-enforced Draconian supervision. Orlando (Christopher Allen) has been shafted of his inheritance by his elder brother Oliver (Andrew Chown) after their late father’s death. Oliver is now forcing Orlando to work as a beast of burden under harsh and, in Abraham’s production, violent conditions. Oliver’s estate resembles a factory-farm staffed by migrant laborers where the failure to achieve your daily quota could be death. Oliver has clearly taken notes on sibling usurpation from Duke Fredrick (Sean Arbuckle), who has recently deposed his sister (in this version) Duchess Senior (Seana McKenna), and taken over her rule. Frederick too is constantly surrounded by guards with machine-guns, and thus the early parts of this production, particularly with the almost-constantly falling-snow of the first act, cause us to see these characters as inhabiting a cruel and dismal world that has no time for romance or self-discovery.
But this is as it should be. As You Like It is a comedy best served tough. The delights experienced by Rosalind (Sara Farb) and Celia (Makambe K. Simamba) in the rough-but-hearty forest of Arden don’t mean much if their homelife is already a water-color idyll. Abraham placing the first half of the play in a contemporary puritanical dystopia almost seems more germane than doing the play in Elizabethan garb, and certainly more organic than the play’s setting of origin (does anyone even remember we’re technically in France?). Starting us in a darker place that gets to move to the light when the characters inhabit Arden and its freedoms gives us somewhere to go. While this As You Like It may not be a rollicking crowd-pleaser, I dare anyone to find any laugh as written by Shakespeare to which it gives short-shrift. The darkness of the early scenes aside, As You Like It is the most affable play Shakespeare ever wrote, and something about the journey out of hostility makes us enjoy the amiable hang-out components all the more.
Abraham’s direction loses focus once we’re planted in Arden. More attention could have been paid to the whys and wherefores of the love-game Rosalind constructs for Orlando: in Cheek By Jowl’s famous all-male production, Rosalind concocted the idea after being disappointed the love of her life didn’t recognize her as disguised in her male persona of ‘Ganymede’. Farb is too detailed a performer not to be clearly going on some journey with the ruse, but why Rosalind needs to go through such an elaborate scheme is a bit opaque. You also feel like Abraham just wasn’t as interested in the “country copulatives” as he was in building the wintry mix of the earlier acts. The characterizations of supporting roles like William (Leon Qin), Audrey (Silvae Mercedes), and Phoebe (Jessica B. Hill) feel painted with large brushstrokes, which is especially too bad for Hill, normally a tremendous performer, who never appears fully comfortable as the firebrand shepherdess. Though Hiro Kanagawa brings effortless gravitas and charm to the role of Corin, often an anonymous walk-on.
In spite of any weaknesses along the way, fundamentally Abraham’s manifesto of the play is guided by a true and feeling recognition of the drama’s heart. This heart is manifest in many ways throughout the show. Seeing Celia’s joy at finding Orlando’s poem on the tree is one. Jacques (Aaron Krohn) actually deciding to stick around for the final wedding song and its festivity is another. And truly the best moments of pure As You Like It revelation come from two of the Act 5 costumes created by designer Julie Fox: the greenery worn by John Ng as Adam/Hymen perfectly shows that the final marriages are presided over by the loving personification of the very spirit of the forest itself; and the makeshift dresses worn by Celia and in particular Rosalind, whose wedding gown looks like it was cobbled together out of Ikea bags with bubble wrap serving as her veil, manages to show the homely but joyous origins of love amidst a rustic landscape. Rarely does a costume choice move you to tears, but these were both such marvelous strokes of the sewing needle.
Did Le Beau need to get shot point blank, or Celia to have a sex dream? I don’t know, but I appreciate that choices were made (I also can’t claim to know why Charles was wrestling “for Rosalind” instead of “for his credit”). And ultimately, I’m delighted composers Ron Sexsmith and Thomas Ryder Payne got to explore the sonic landscape of the play through Shakespeare’s greatest tunes. The communal “friendsgiving” at the end of Shakespeare’s Act 2, where all of Senior’s “merry men” sit down to an improvised feast, and Amiens (Gabriel Antonacci) blesses the assembled with “Blow, blow thou winter wind,” was as moving and bittersweet a delight as you could ask for.
Plotlessness aside, no play of Shakespeare’s creates such a loving and inviting universe. Abraham clearly understands what makes As You Like It special, as it's one of the few plays the Bard wrote where you could conceivably say “I’d like to live in that play.” I know I’d choose the forest of Arden over mushy Illyria or the surveillance state of Messina. Abraham’s rendering of As You Like It creates a community between the performers and the audience, reminding us that even though “we have seen better days,” a better world is possible through the emergent properties of hope and resilience.As You Like It is the ultimate Shakespearean comfort food. Somehow or another, I plan on watching it on my deathbed.
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