AS YOU LIKE IT
And since people come into the marketplace with vastly different desires and qualifications, the chances of a mutually satisfying trade are remote. One of the two parties is bound to get a better deal.
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But Shakespeare is no sentimentalist. He is not offering some sugar-coated celebration of romantic love. On the contrary, he offers a dissenting viewpoint–instead of lamenting the failure of real life to equal romantic ideals, he makes gentle fun of the romantic ideals for not coinciding with real life. The ending is happy, at least for those characters who successfully negotiate their way into conjugal bliss, but there’s a healthy dose of vanity, rejection, and fickle behavior thrown in to keep the accounts balanced.
Once in the forest, these characters start to pair off. Touchstone takes up with a homely shepherd girl named Audrey, but he turns conventional romance upside down. Instead of his love object inflaming his desires, he acknowledges that his desires already exist, and he is merely looking for someone to satisfy them: “As the ox hath his bow, sir, the horse his curb and the falcon her bells, so man hath his desires; and as pigeons bill, so wedlock would be nibbling.” Touchstone’s arbitrary choice of a partner, however, forces Audrey to reject the simple shepherd who loves her.
Eric Simonson has done an admirable job of staging this play for the Bailiwick Repertory. Any young director who takes on Shakespeare is bound to get in over his head, and Simonson seems to have been overwhelmed at times. He couldn’t, for example, get the actors to recite Shakespeare particularly well, so their actions seem detached from their speech. Jeremy Piven and Barb Prescott are certainly attractive enough as Orlando and Rosalind, but Piven’s voice is thin, making him hard to hear at times, and Prescott’s delivery tends to be flat, so their romance doesn’t exactly throw off any sparks. Steve Totland goes to the opposite extreme, making Touchstone loud and frantic, but still failing to connect his actions to his words. Only Tim Monsion is an exception–his firm grasp of the dialogue as the melancholy Jacques allows him to create a personality to go with the words.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Suzanne N. Plunkett.
