One of Shakespeare's most enduring comedies heads to the Common
Advertisement
'There's something quite mad about pursuing love in the midst of terrible adversity,' Maler said. 'But why else does one want to live, right?'
'As You Like It' opens with two sets of brothers at war: Orlando's older brother Oliver has schemed him out of his inheritance and is trying to kill him, and Duke Frederick has usurped his older brother Duke Senior and banished him to the Forest of Arden. Under mounting threat at court, Senior's daughter Rosalind too escapes to the forest with her cousin Olivia, with Rosalind disguising herself as a man to keep the two out of danger. Orlando is also in the forest hiding from his brother — and though he and Rosalind met and were instantly attracted to each other at court, he doesn't recognize her in her disguise. In classic Shakespearean fashion, Rosalind takes this as an opportunity to give Orlando man-to-man lessons on how to woo her, revealing her true identity at the play's jubilant end.
Advertisement
Much of the play's enduring appeal comes from Rosalind, one of Shakespeare's most richly-rendered women (she's sometimes referred to as 'the female Hamlet'). 'She's a vibrant ambassador of the human spirit,' CSC veteran Nora Eschenheimer, who plays Rosalind in the production, said. 'She's smart, she's broken, she's brave, she's terrified — all of the best human traits.'
On top of all that complexity, the role of Rosalind also demands some dizzying feats of meta-acting. For much of the play, Rosalind herself is playing her male alter ego, Ganymede. There are several scenes in which Ganymede is role-playing as Rosalind in the courtship lessons with Orlando — so Eschenheimer is playing Rosalind, who's playing Ganymede, who's playing Rosalind (in Shakespeare's time, this would have been even further complicated by the fact that Rosalind, like every female role, would have been played by a man).
To Eschenheimer (who herself leads a kind of double life — when she's not acting, she's a lighthouse keeper and boat captain in Rhode Island) exploring all those layers is 'thrilling.'
'What's sort of wild to me is that Rosalind is more in disguise at the top of the play
than when she's Ganymede,' she said. Freed from the confines of noblewomanhood, Rosalind is able to be more truthful — and also conveniently gets to instruct her future partner on exactly how she wants to be loved, setting the groundwork for a relationship of equals.
Advertisement
'As You Like It''s other well-known calling card is its dual settings, Duke Frederick's authoritarian court and the untamed Forest of Arden (likely inspired by Shakespeare's own personal affinity for the countryside). In Maler's hands, the court is a colorless, Brutalist space of steel and metal with an encroaching edge of decay, peppered with propaganda posters. Even the clothing is restrictive and rigid — in the opening scenes, Rosalind's costume feels, Eschenheimer said, 'like a straitjacket.'
Color, like Duke Senior and his allies, has been banished to the forest. When the characters leave their home behind to build a new community in the wild, 'the play just opens up and breathes out into this pastoral wander through the woods, and it's glorious,' Maler says. In the Common, Arden is as splashy and vibrant as a Jean-Jacques Rousseau painting. It's also a found space cobbled together by outcasts ('magpied' together, as Maler said). There, Rosalind gets to ditch her straitjacket for breezier attire.
Maler is careful to note that Arden is not paradise — it's cold and difficult to survive, and the characters who dwell in the forest are there because they have no other choice. But those circumstances have an equalizing effect — lords and shepherds alike are forced to mingle and work together, and when the social strata disappear, they're able to create a kind of utopia, where everyone not only survives but is able to find joy and celebration.
'It's a play about binding together, finding people who are equally dedicated to finding a better way forward,' Eschenheimer said. It's a story, she continues, in which no one (except the villains) gives up — the characters in this play unfailingly choose to battle on in the face of tyranny.
Advertisement
'What I would like people to take away from this production is that there's hope on the other side,' Eschenheimer said. 'Even in the bleakest of times — we just need to trudge forward.'
AS YOU LIKE IT
Free, 1 p.m. or 8 p.m., Parkman Bandstand, Boston Common, July 23-Aug. 10,
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Epoch Times
a day ago
- Epoch Times
Madcap Misunderstandings on a Midsummer Night
CHICAGO—'A Midsummer Night's Dream' is not only Shakespeare's most beloved comedy, but it's also the most popular of his works for summer audiences. Those familiar with it can understand why: It's a perfect fit for an outdoor park setting. After all, the story about mistaken love and madcap matchings takes place mostly in a forest. The idea of giving audiences a free summer night out in the company of the most famous playwright of all time began 12 years ago with Chicago Shakespeare Theater's outing in Chicago parks. It was so well received that it has become a yearly tradition for the city and the theater company.
New York Times
2 days ago
- New York Times
When Acting Is More Than a Career
These days, being an actor — especially if you're a woman, especially if you're an American woman — isn't just about acting. You have to also be a marketer (of yourself, of a product). Ideally, you should also be an entrepreneur. You should express your politics intelligently, but you should be prepared for public opinion to turn on you for doing so in a way that doesn't feel authentic or sounds too strident, or for choosing the wrong issues altogether. Acting itself is no longer the end goal of your career — it's a gateway to being a director or founding a production company. Acting is your way into a different life, not life itself. This is increasingly true for young actors everywhere, but it's perhaps less so in the U.K. There, for both business and cultural reasons, even internationally known and commercially successful actors are expected to make regular appearances in plays; you're more likely to see them turning up in strange, low-budget or otherwise unconventional TV or film roles. Many of them are graduates of the country's storied acting schools, where Shakespeare is emphasized and theater is prioritized. Actors are among the U.K.'s greatest exports; Hollywood and Broadway would be lesser places without them. But even in this context, the London-based Irish actress Jessie Buckley stands out for her diversity of roles and singularity of spirit. At 35, she skipped over the ingénue phase, choosing instead a series of indefinable, distinct characters marked not by their looks or sympathy but by their sincerity and sense of wounded, tender pride — a nuclear fallout survivor in the 2019 mini-series 'Chernobyl'; a dissenter in a close-knit Mennonite community in the 2022 movie 'Women Talking'; and the impassioned, fragile Sally Bowles in the 2021 London production of 'Cabaret.' 'There are threads that connect [her] performances,' writes T's digital director, Alice Newell-Hanson, in her profile of the actress. 'Buckley allows her characters to be prickly with unresolved tension — between individual and family, abandon and care, creativity and responsibility.' In the coming months, Buckley will have two starring roles in anticipated films: first as Shakespeare's wife in 'Hamnet,' and then as the titular character in 'The Bride,' a remake of the 1935 film 'Bride of Frankenstein.' When Newell-Hanson met her in May, she was also 33 weeks pregnant with her first child. Her life is about to change. But one senses that, no matter what, she'll continue to chart her own course, and that her ambitions will remain her own as well: a performer who lives to perform. 'Life is magical and mercurial,' she says. To watch her onscreen or onstage is to believe that too. Hair by Orlando Pita at Home Agency. Makeup by Francelle Daly for Love Craft Beauty. Set design by Patience Harding at New School Rep
New York Times
2 days ago
- New York Times
Jessie Buckley Goes Where Few Actresses Dare
THE NIGHT BEFORE I saw the movie 'Hamnet' in May, I dreamed that I lost the baby I was carrying at the very end of my pregnancy. It was harrowing but not totally surprising. I was in fact pregnant, and the film, which will be released in November and which I'd been planning to see for weeks, is about the death of a child. Based on the Northern Irish writer Maggie O'Farrell's 2020 novel of the same name, it's a fictionalized account of how William Shakespeare and his wife — who in this version is Agnes, an herbalist said to be the daughter of a forest witch — grapple with the loss of their son, Hamnet, to the plague. As its star, the Irish actress Jessie Buckley, later said to me, it's 'a pretty brutal one to watch while you're pregnant.' When we dream, our bodies experience the emotions of our unconscious selves almost as acutely as if we were awake. It's a nightly suspension of disbelief that allows even the least imaginative person to act out fictional scenes with startling intensity. But the real trick, of course, is to pull off this illusion while awake: to perform an event you've never experienced with the immediacy of real life. For an actor, that requires craft. To maintain the fantasy, they must pretend they're not being watched, whether by cameras or audiences, but they must also — or at least, the very best actors do — compel their viewers to feel what they are feeling, no matter how much those witnesses might rather turn away. In 'Hamnet,' when Agnes realizes that, despite all her efforts, her son is no longer breathing, she releases a wrenching, full-bodied scream, filmed from the side so that we can see the sound erupting from her mouth, then dissolving into silence, her lips still straining, as if her grief is ultimately unutterable. Buckley's performance of loss, here and in the rest of the film, seems to draw from some dark place where every parent's worst nightmare has pooled. Her scream is both unfathomable and instantly recognizable, a reminder of the potential for tragedy that lies just beneath the surface of life. More than any other quality, it's this ability — to peel back that veneer and enter the places we'd rather not go — that has earned Buckley a reputation for playing complicated roles with devastating power. Chloé Zhao, the director of 'Hamnet,' says that as soon as she read the book, which she adapted with O'Farrell, she knew the role had to be Buckley's. Few other actresses of her generation can gain access to such a wide spectrum of emotions, or seem as willing to risk being disliked for exploring the tougher ones. 'She has no fear in terms of how she's perceived,' says Paul Mescal, 29, who plays Shakespeare in the film. 'She's never trying to hide or draw lines.' In 'Hamnet,' she is part earth mother, tending bees with muddy fingernails and giving birth in the roots of a tree, and part practical parent and partner, revealing with barely perceptible gestures — a searching stare, a terse response — the tug between her own mourning, the small daily tasks of child rearing and her anger at her husband's seeming absence after their son's death. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
