As You Like It (review)

As You Like It was the first of this year's two Shakespeare in the Park productions presented by the New York Public Theater. (The other was a well-received revival of a John Guare and Galt MacDermott's Two Gentlemen of Verona: The Musical, written for the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1971). Performances of this play always seem to challenge the viewer's memory. The problem is that the memory of the play rarely matches the experience of actually watching it performed. Reviews make it clear that the play is never quite as wonderful as the critics expected it to be—though they are often not quite certain why that is so. One reason may be that, although Rosalind is arguably one of Shakespeare's greatest roles, even the best Rosalind has a hard time living up to the reputation of delight fostered by nineteenth-century reviewers, who had the charming distraction of the actress in tights to get them through her more loquacious moments. The other reason for discontent may be, as Director Mark Lamos pointed out, "the narrative drive all but stops an hour into it." Michael Feingold's Village Voice review is worth looking at for a longer discussion of how the play can bring out the "curmudgeon" in even the most knowledgeable critic, leading them to declare that there are a lot of "mashed turnips" in the play.

Actually, the Public's production deserved higher marks than it received from the critics. This is a surprisingly difficult play; the Shakespeare comedy of which almost every production is endearing (at least for me) is A Midsummer Night's Dream, and not, as everyone expects, As You Like It. Contrary to popular belief (a false memory really), Rosalind is not automatically endearing. She can be an awfully self-satisfied bore. The Public's Rosalind, Lynn Collins may have been a bit too giggly and full of girlish romp. She said, in an interview in Theater Mania.com, that she felt Portia (her role in the Al Pacino film) was about intellect, but Rosalind was "more about frivolity, love, infatuation and youth"—which I think is a bit unfair to Rosalind, but a pitfall that has tripped up some of the most experienced of actors. The critics, despite their reservations, agreed to love Collins's Ganymede; tradition and memory would have been betrayed had they not. Still, Rosalind's adventures in the forest are trickier to pull off than Hermia's or even Helena's, and Shakespeare in the Park's production acquitted itself admirably. Lamos, who seems to direct Shakespeare productions everywhere but New York, was in charge of this As You Like It, a play he had directed only once before, twenty years ago. This time he wanted to avoid being overly conceptual and to give the play a chance to "breathe and be as simple as it is." He achieved this by keeping to a single, unchanging set, and by trusting the play to the extent of letting characters come on, do their piece, and just get on with it. He also made sure that it visually resembled a fairy tale, so the magic was not lost.

The fast-paced production was very clearly, and often intensely, spoken, with a great deal of physical action that never, however, seemed frenetic or gratuitous. There are no clocks...