As You Like It, and: A Midsummer Night's Dream (review)

Shakespeare is not usually associated with Memphis, Tennessee. Though rich in music and culture, Graceland and Beale Street, not the Globe, mark our iconic landscape. Shakespeare's plays are performed—and performed well—at such venues as Playhouse on the Square or Theater Memphis, at Rhodes College or the University of Memphis. But that was before Dan McCleary founded the Tennessee Shakespeare Company, gathering a professional company of actors and the energy they brought with them.

As You Like Itin performance is often praised for its classical balance. McCleary's As You Like It, the Tennessee Shakespeare Company's inaugural production in the Fall of 2008, offered a more boisterous but no less wondrous variant: full-throated, broken music of as many multi-part harmonies as the actors and audience members could discover. This was a production that crackled with kinetic energy even before we heard the play's opening lines. McCleary's strategy seemed to be to welcome the audience into the actors' space by sharing its conventional secrets with us, like a magician cuing his audience to feel the magic, paradoxically by sharing with them the secrets of the game. Even before the windowed doors within the St. George Episcopal Church opened to admit us into the nave, we were allowed to see the actors playing Orlando and Charles, as they choreographed their wrestling scene, bounding from altar to aisle in precisely blocked movements that mapped out the contours of this stage. In the wrestling scene itself, those contours expanded to include the audience, sitting in delightful apprehension as the actors climbed over or hid behind us, blurring the boundary between "us" and "them." The company's use of early modern practices such as a bare, thrust stage, universal lighting, and an acting style poised between presentational and representational, kept that boundary blurred. DeVere Jehl's Orlando, for example, had a thoroughly believable freshness; yet his wild manipulation of his facial muscles as he desperately and vainly attempted to respond to Rosalind after the wrestling match, ranked with any of Joe E. Brown's presentational vaudeville displays.

Music was central to this production. Its harmony held together the multiple energies of As You Like It, just as it integrated actors with audience. Celtic music and its instruments—dulcimer, guitar, fiddle, banjo—established the production's sense of place before the play even began: Memphis around 1840, during the early years of Scotch-Irish migration. The songs had a haunting association with Melania Levitsky's Rosalind and Julie Webster's Celia. As part of the prelude to the play, Rosalind, alone at first, then joined by Celia, began to sing the original version of Robert Burns's...