As You Like It at the Here Arts Center, March 15?April 1, 2007

As You Like It is a social play that addresses primarily social concerns, and throughout its four-hundred-year production history, it has remained a particular favorite—especially for newer audiences to Shakespearean theater, it seems—because of its deceptive outward accessibility and crowd-pleasing androgyny. It is a play marked by its daring initiative to cross lines of social stability—oscillating between comedic cross-dressing and the gravity of questioning gender roles. Yet, due to the relative dearth of plot, As You Like It relies heavily on its actors' own personal contributions. Thus, as in the eighteenth century we might have clamored to see one actress's "peculiarities," or in the nineteenth wondered how another would fare with physical exposure, we are similarly expectant in the twenty-first about how the actors will act: so many social and cultural changes have occurred and are occurring (such as a more sympathetic public stance on issues of homosexuality and trans-genderedness), that the way we see As You Like It once again becomes a question of who's playing whom.

I recently had the opportunity to attend an all-male production of the play in New York City. Poortom Productions (billed as the city's only all-male Shakespeare company), ran the piece from 15 March to 1 April 2007 in a small theater with an arena stage. Although I recognize the necessity for a somewhat minimalist approach regarding scenery, I was disturbed to notice that not one, but two set designers (Wilson Chin and Kanae Heike) had merely managed to furnish two dingy shag carpets (one red, for the court, and one green for the Forest of Arden) in the center of the stage. Any pre-conceived notions of actual agrarianism I might have had silently fluttered away. This production was not going to be pastoral, but pastiche.

The characters' costumes were a medley of home-spun nineteenth-century dress and several pairs of what were obviously tweaked twentieth-century jeans. Efforts were made to convey a time period—the problem was deciding which one it happened to be. In a way, however, Poortom's choices ultimately worked: because no one could decide what anything was supposed to be, the main draw of the play in performance—the cross-gendering role of Rosalind-as-Ganymede-as-Rosalind—took on a life of its own. But Rosalind, played by Erik Gratton, soon became problematic on a level entirely unrelated to costume; the gender-switching notwithstanding, Gratton seemed to forget that Rosalind is a woman. What we ended up with was often a theatrically appropriated, comedic version of a gay male in drag, and it was never clear whether this move was intentional. But indeed, Gratton was not the only culprit. As the play continued, it seemed as though many of the actors could not take their underlying roles seriously enough, when cross-dressed themselves, or even when interacting with a cross-dresser. Their masks (so to speak) fit well enough, but never perfectly. The growing perceptions of the actors as twenty-first-century actors often became an obstacle to the sort of hoydenish expectations that are typical for the Rosalind role (the tomboy imbued with an indefinable "feminine" attraction), and this made the male flirtation scenes hover between what probably would have been risqué twenty years ago, and what is progressively normal today. But this aspect is, for the most part, what eventually made the production so provocative: the underlying sense of our own (metatheatrical) awareness of the particular culture in which the play is now being produced, and that the atmosphere this awareness eventually creates and thrives in is also irreducibly anachronistic. Because there is an all-male cast, we are always aware that it is an all-male cast; as an audience, our own subjectivity prevents us from suspending our disbelief.

What made the piece truly entertaining was the actors' physical dynamism. It was a very small stage—with perhaps the square-footage of a typical master bedroom—but every inch was trodden on, rolled upon, and...