Ashland Theatre Note: As You Like It

There are so many things to like about the Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of As You Like It, that it’s a shame there’s a queer kind of vacuum at the center. The play displays, first of all, an exuberant physicality—lots of little kicks, pirouettes, and high-fives, obviously choreographed by somebody with great care (I assume the director, J. R. Sullivan?). This kind of thing can be a distraction if it takes over but whoever put it together made sure that each little gesture makes sense in context and helps move the plot-line downfield. Indeed a critical plot-point is a wrestling match, so elaborately crafted (on the model of a Thomas Hart Benton painting—thanks, Hal) that it garnered a round of applause all its own.

The setting is—rather, settings are—deliberately anachronistic. This can be a dodgy business, but here I think it mostly worked. The “court” scenes leapt right out of 1930s Batman, which made sense because it helps to establish the mood of social instability and casual violence that frames the story. The “country” scenes were more on the order of Garrison Keillor, which was acceptable, though for the life of me I can’t imagine why they insisted on leaving Duke Senior in a bowler hat. I do regret the failure of nerve that impelled them to replace the original Shakespearean song texts with early country and funky cowboy. Granted as the tune, melody, we have no idea what, exactly the Shakespearean players sang. But the text is Shakespeare and it has its purpose which should not be lightly regarded.

[But speaking of Shakespearean texts, what is it with the sonnets? This is the second show in a row we’ve seen where they felt they had to tart up the script with a bit of sonnet action—hardly evil in itself, but not serving any obvious positive purpose].

Casting was never less than adequate and sometimes wonderful. The play has to have a good Touchstone and a good Jaques, and this performance had both—also a bunch of other good performances in a variety of roles. The surprise of the day was Danforth Comyns as Orlando. By common understanding, Orlando is a Labrador retriever role if there ever was one—the tenor lead who has no more function than to stand still and look pretty, like the groom on the wedding cake (someone has said that Rosalind will spend her life doing Orlando’s thinking for him). But Comyns reminds us (once again?) that there are no empty Shakespearean roles—he gives Orlando grit and sinew and makes Rosalind’s enchantment plausible as I have never seen it before.

Which brings us to Rosalind and her cousin/companion Celia. Matter of some delicacy here. I grant that Rosalind may be the toughest role in the Shakespearean canon: a girl-boy-girl (sometimes a boy-girl-boy-girl) who speaks about love and womanhood with a clear-sightedness that is nearly unique. No wonder that almost every good actress wants to give it a swing. And you find yourself rooting for Miriam Laube, who understands that she has a great opportunity, and struggles to embrace it.

Yet at the end of the day, you get the feeling that she just can’t find the right note. Part of the problem is that she is caught in a crazy syncretic mélange. She has a voice of a cabaret singer; but they decked her out a costume left over from Hee Haw. Then to top it off, they put her through a display of swoops and kicks so manic that she looked like the speeded-up celluloid of an old Buster Keaton movie. And here, unlike in other parts of the show, there often seemed to be little or no relation between the character’s moment and the physical byplay. Hardly any wonder that in this thicket, Laube never seemed really able to find her own (one saving grace: I loved the way she did the epilogue).

An added complication was Julie Oda as Celia. Anybody who saw Oda in The Importance of Being Earnest knows that she is a glorious comic talent—funny and sexy and full of energy all the time. As with Danforth Comyns as Orlando, she squeezed more out of Celia than I have ever seen before, but that’s a problem. I don’t blame Oda here, who was just being her adorable self. But if Rosalind is not to dominate, then at least they must work as a team. And an As You Like It without a Rosalind is a play with a vacuum at the center.