"As You LIke It" at Oregon Shakespeare Festival

Oregon Shakespeare Festival ensemble photo by Jenny Graham

It's always a little bittersweet when we come to the last show of a trip to Ashland. One wants to enjoy every moment, but there is the knowledge that it's ending and there is a drive home coming up. But sometimes we get lucky (or is it smart?) and schedule a comedy to be the last show of the trip. Such was the case yesterday with As You Like It.

The Play

With most Shakespearean comedies, you have to just kind of accept some rather bizarre premise and go with it, because if you think too much about it, you'll just sit there shaking your head for a couple of hours. This is no exception.

For reasons never really explained or understood, Duke Frederick has exiled his sibling Duke Senior to the forest of Arden, which turns out to be a kind of pastoral paradise where exiles collect, herd sheep, and fall in love. I'm kind of unclear why this is such a punishment, since Duke Frederick has turned the city into a kind of autocratic hellhole. But there we are. And Duke Senior's daughter, Rosalind, didn't get exiled because she was super great friends with her cousin, Celia. Until she makes the mistake of being attracted to Orlando, the younger son of Sir Rowland de Boys. I can't remember why Frederick hated deBoys, and therefore his son(s), but again, there we are.

So Frederick is mad at Rosalind and banishes her. So she runs off to Arden, and Celia goes with her (making Frederick all the madder), and the court fool, Touchstone, decides to join them because reasons. Then Orlando finds out, and decides to follow her to Arden. But of course Rosalind is traveling disguised as a man called Ganymede, so when she and the lovesick Orlando meet up, it's obvious that she can't just reveal herself (which would make this a very short play indeed), but must instead tell him to pretend Ganymede is Rosalind and practice wooing. And he goes along with it for some reason.

Meanwhile Rosalind/Ganymede also encounters Duke Senior (her mother) and again can't reveal herself. And other stuff happens. A shepherdess falls in love with Ganymede, apparently because "he" is unkind to her. The fool falls for a shepherd. Orlando's estranged older brother, Oliver, realizes what an idiot he is and runs off to Arden where he in turn falls for Celia (who is still traveling as a woman, but calling herself Aliena (or something like that), because changing her name will make her unrecognizable. Or something.

Truly, none of this story makes a lick of sense, but somehow it's kind of silly and fun, and you find you don't mind so much, and isn't the forest pleasant?

The Production

Because the story is  complex and confusing one, OSF and directory Rosa Joshi have decided to liven it up by gender-swapping some of the roles. So Duke Senior is somehow a woman (Rachel Crowl), for example. As is Jacques (Erica Sullivan), one of Duke Senior's attendants who serves as sort of a fool-in-exile to be a foil to the other fool, Touchstone (Rex Young), because one can never have too many fools in a comedy.

Rosalind (Jessica Ko) is really very good, though. She has a remarkable ability to change apparent moods almost instantly, which works well in a play where nothing is what it appears to be from moment to moment. Orlando (Román Zaragoza) is (unsurprisingly) quite befuddled most of the time, because he seems to be the only one in Arden who isn't pretending to be someone or something that he isn't. But he makes kind of an amiable if inexplicably dimwitted foil for Rosalind's manipulations.

The set is kind of interestingly colorful and fairly simple, though one might wonder why there are large chimes hanging throughout the forest, for example. The scenes in Duke Frederick (Kevin Kenerly)'s court are needlessly long and regimented--we get the point already. But overall, the whole thing sort of works in a big, convoluted, silly way.

Bottom Line

This isn't a brilliant play. It's a confusing mish-mash of a play. And for some reason Joshi felt the need to add to that, rather than make it clearer. I guess that's an approach. In any case, it works fine as long as you don't try to make sense of it, because there is no sense to be had at at point. Maybe they were just trying to compete with the outdoor adaptation of Alice in Wonderland (which I did not see) for the title of most absurd spectacle in the festival this year.

It's hard to say what they think they were up to, but on some weird, surreal level, it kind of works. It doesn't have the technical polish that was evident in All's Well, for example, that elevated that beyond the limitations of the script. This production just seems to sort of buy into the absurdity of the story and try to match it with absurdities in the production. I can respect that.

Some parts of this really work, and it was fun and engaging, but weird. So I can't endorse it wholeheartedly, but if you go in with fairly low expectations (like, don't plan on anything making sense) you can have a good time.

This production runs through the end of the season in late October in the Bowmer Theatre.