AS YOU LIKE IT
Oak Park Festival Theatre
Most folks seem to consider A Midsummer Night’s Dream the essential Shakespearean outdoor play. I prefer As You Like It. Both comedies offer up an enchanted forest, ruled by Love, where madness is a form of doting, deceit is playful, and evil simply can’t survive. But the enchantment in As You Like It is quieter and more natural, the humor drier and more rueful than in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Written a few years after that play and maybe a decade before The Tempest, As You Like It stands just about halfway between the watermelon sweetness of the one and the dusty grandeur of the other. It’s a fairy tale for grown-ups: the perfect show to watch from a beach chair in the grass.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
So when I heard Oak Park would be doing it, I just naturally forgot all my old grievances and compunctions and told myself, This’ll be lovely.
Mula’s insight is most apparent–and most useful–where Rosalind and Orlando are concerned. The central lovers of As You Like It, they first lock eyebeams at the court of the evil usurper, Duke Frederick, then meet again in Arden, where they’ve gone separately to escape murderous relatives. Their second meeting finds Rosalind in deep cover, posing as a young man and calling herself Ganymede after one of Jupiter’s many mythic boyfriends. She encounters Orlando wandering the forest, thoroughly lovesick, but won’t reveal herself to him. She befriends him as Ganymede, instead, coaching him on how to woo fair Rosalind.
But Matt K. Miller’s scrappy, solid Orlando is a nice change from the lovesick boys of tradition; and Kathy Santen makes Rosalind’s masquerade much more than an occasion for putting on a mannish swagger: in her hands, it becomes a means for expressing Rosalind’s otherwise frustrated wit, strength, and personal power. Douglas Post’s music is simple, sweet, and clear. Very much in the Mula spirit. Very much as I, for one, like it.
Conscientiously, energetically dumb jokes. The coeds include a potty-mouthed classical actress, a white-trash satyr, an apple-cheeked teen named Skeeter, and a hamster-loving soldier of fortune. The plot involves a homicidal clown, and Fluffy the dog does tricks.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jennifer Girard.
