As You Like It - Fresh

Visitors to the Forest of Arden in R. Jeffrey Cohen’s As You Like It—Fresh! will find more accents than leaves, not to mention some non-traditional casting that would scare even B.D. Wong. However, since this production envisions Frederick’s dukedom as Wall Street and Madison Square Garden, and Arden as the South Bronx, such pluralism drives home Shakespeare’s points about the unpredictable nature of love and Cohen’s theme of the violence bred by prejudice and injustice. The social commentary often seems less Avon than Avenue A, but the text is untampered with, and at least the modern schtick (on his line “and by how much defense is better than no skill,” Touchstone displays a walletful of Trojans) keeps it from being a bore.

Jacques’s seven ages of man monologue gets tossed off as the rantings of a melancholy eccentric, but Charles Hall rallies a tired and sweaty audience with his hip reworking of the seven stages of an argument, complete with the physical zip-snaps made popular by television’s In Living Color. Mr. Hall also engages in lively banter with Corin, the shepherd who’s disguised as well, in Hindi. It works, because Michael Twaine invests Corin with an amusing, surprisingly expedient Indian accent. Vinny Edghill earns solid laughs as Charles, the cocky prizefighter who meets his match in Orlando. He’s one of the few castmembers totally successful at marrying the verse to modern, comic dialect. Michael Wells and Linda Powell share delightful moments as the terminally mismatched Silvius and Phoebe.

Scenes of the exiled Duke (Howard Wesson, here a grizzled, bland, Americanized Fagin attended to by members of a high-spirited but murderous gang, don’t quite come off, but the play’s climactic couplings arouse the expected smiles, and Cohen’s surprising note of tragedy at curtainfall catches one off guard in a provocative, unsettling way.

Mitchell Confer’s set relies mainly on a triptych of projected slides that intrigues at first, but one wishes for more varied photography and more visual contrast between the Duke’s halls of power and the burnt-out forest.

Upon my walk back to the train station following the performance, I witnessed a brutal fistfight on First Avenue, was approached by a group of teens who desired my spare change (upon refusal, they tossed out a few insults but spared my person), skirted past the garbage can treasure-hunt of a staggering drunk, and basically enjoyed the New York Experience. What struck me most was the immediate if obvious relevance of the play I’d just seen. In the only dialogue of the evening not quoted verbatim from the Bard, Rosalind breaks character at the end of the play to warn us that while a privileged few can escape the urban nightmare into Ardenesque retreats, the majority must struggle constantly to surmount the chaotic violence around us. Brevity and unstrained sincerity save the speech from preachiness; though the monologue tries to leave us with a message of hope and understanding, sadly, it’s the final gunshot ringing in our ears that tells the true story of our condition.