As You Like It

I must admit to some prejudice here: it’s getting pretty hard to do an As You Like It as I like it, since I’ve reached the saturation point with Shakespeare’s romantic comedy (three productions in two years, four in three). Like Twelfth Night, this tale of woodland wooing reaches an appealing climax when four couples finally pair off, but unlike Twelfth Night and other Shakespeare plays, As You Like It is short on impetus. Everyone in the Forest of Arden is essentially killing time, be it the exiled Duke and his friends bantering about philosophy, or the banished Rosalind, who, disguised as a boy, gives Orlando (Trellis Stepter) lessons in love.

No doubt Mark Rylance, director of this Theater for a New Audience production, agrees that we’ve had our fill of summery, frolicky As You Like Its in public parks. His solution lies not only in playing up the play’s wintry side (the story takes place during Christmastime) but in moving the action to a modern-day America, with a thuggish Duke Frederick controlling Vegas gambling, a junkyard in the forest, and Touchstone the fool gargling with Signal mouthwash. It’s all very genial (or, in Theater for a New Audience’s current production, gently somber) and only sporadically compelling. There’s novelty in having one scene take place in a casino, and a nice visual moment when Oliver (Leon Addison Brown), physically tossed out of the Duke’s palace, stares up from the ground at two ominous wooden doors as the lights snap off.

But the modernizations here feel like cute, anachronistic touches rather than a legitimate way of rethinking the story. Instead of marveling at how easily the Bard’s comedy adapts to modern dress, we keep waiting for the next moment in the text that will jar with Rylance’s overall concept. One can also gripe that this mounting’s quietude makes the play a bit of a drag; any As You Like It that runs past two and a half hours (this one hits 2:50!) has stopped seeing the forest for the trees.

But Theater for a New Audience is nothing if not a troupe that can compensate with special touches and special actors. Mr. Rylance himself is a blessing every time he appears as Touchstone. Low-key, with just a pinch of Stan Laurelesque bemusement, Rylance’s laconic fool nonetheless serves as sharp comic relief to the mildness around him. If only more scenes had the visual beauty of the forest snowfall (care of set designer Jenny Tiramani) or the delight of Rylance’s late-hour musical number with David Dossey complete with washboard bass and dance duet.

Perfectly comfortable with the Bard as always is Miriam Healy-Louie, who made an adorable foil to Rylance’s Henry V last year and charms anew as Rosalind. Too bad the Orlando of Trellis Stepter is no match to Healy-Louie in language, depth, or appeal. David Dossey, who plays both Charles the wrestler and the shepherdess Audrey, gets laughs from his girth and female attire and not his middling success with Shakespearean verse. Some nice work, though, from Melissa Ford as a squinty Phoebe, Erin J. O’ Brien, who quietly plays up the lesbian subtext twixt her Celia and Healy-Louie’s Rosalind, and Michael Rudko’s Jaques, whose “Seven Ages of Man” casts its intended pall on proceedings that are already somewhat pallid.

But it’s As You Like It, and it’s Shakespeare, and despite longeurs, it usually sustains our interest, so I guess our parks and stages will be serving it up ad nauseam for the rest of our natural lives. One can’t blame Theater for a New Audience for staking its own claim, but isn’t there a Beaumont and Fletcher play that needs doing?