As You Like It at Shakespeare & Company (Lenox, Mass.)

Delighted with the Richard III we’d seen in 2010, we went back to Lenox, Massachusetts a week ago to see Shakespeare & Company’s As You Like It. This was Shakespeare without gimmicks — lively, well-acted, well-directed, and low-tech, done by people who weren’t afraid the play itself wouldn’t be enough to entertain an audience. We couldn’t have spent our afternoon better, and the rest of the smiling audience apparently thought as we did.

Orlando (Tony Roach) and his brother Oliver (Josh Aaron McCabe) come to blows in the opening scene. Faithful servant Adam (Malcolm Ingram) is shocked.

The story of As You Like It is fundamentally frivolous, and this company didn’t try to make the play carry more than it could. For many years we had trouble appreciating the Shakespeare comedies; the humor depends so much on now-obsolete turns of phrase. But in this show the gags and laugh lines seemed spontaneous and fresh.

Bare-chested Orlando (Tony Roach) prepares to vanquish the wrestler Charles (Kevin O'Donnell); Rosalind (Merritt Janson), spectating, is smitten.

This play is, we now realize, a love story. We don’t mean the infatuations that flare up like dry grass between Rosalind and Orlando, Celia and Oliver, and the jester Touchstone and the country wench Audrey; we mean instead the solid, sisterly love betweeen Rosalind (Merritt Janson) and Celia (Kelley Curran). Their rapport was transparent; we had no difficulty believing that the affectionate Celia would leave her cushy life at the court to accompany her boy-crazy cousin into exile. Rosalind and Celia will always be best friends, but who would think that the romance between Rosalind and the over-serious, gullible Orlando (Tony Roach), writer of bad love verses, would survive much past their honeymoon?

These actors mined their lines for all they were worth. You may think you know the play, but did you realize that minutes after Rosalind met Orlando, she told Celia that she wanted to have his baby? (It’s ten lines into Act I, Scene 2.) You would if you’d seen this production, and a lot more. And the sight gags were superb. “Liberty” is, of course, one of the play’s great themes — both Rosalind and Jacques rhapsodize about it. But we were struck helpless when, at just the right moment, and for just a split second, Ms. Curran pantomimed the Statue of Liberty. For actresses playing Celia/Aliena, one of the big challenges must be figuring out what to do during the several long scenes in which the character is on-stage without any lines. In Act III, Scene 2, Ms. Curran solved the problem with a rapid-fire series of hilarious, dead-on pantomimes of Rosalind/Ganymede’s descriptions of how she was to cure Orlando of his love-madness.

Director Tony Simotes took especial care to connect the action and the dialogue, sometimes in unexpected ways. In Act II, Scene 3, for instance, Celia calls to Rosalind and Touchstone: “I pray you, bear with me; I cannot go no further.” Touchstone responds with one of the rare Elizabethan puns that still works after 400 years: “For my part, I had rather bear with you than bear you.” In this show, however, Touchstone has already come onto the stage bearing Celia on his back. Later, as the “All the world’s a stage” monologue comes to a close, Orlando helps the old, infirm Adam onto the stage just as the lines “second childishness and mere oblivion/Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything” are spoken.

Rare is the Shakespeare director who can resist the urge to try something “different” with a familiar play, and Mr. Simotes is apparently not such a director. The novelty in this show was the casting of the philosophic, monastic, misanthropic Jacques as a woman — and not just a woman, but a lesbian with an unrequited passion for Celia/Aliena, which she conveyed through longing glances and gestures. (Celia/Aliena rejected her overtures with an appreciative but it-can-never-be smile.) The gender of Jacques, who wore an androgynous black suit, confused the other characters as well as the audience; a bemused Touchstone (Jonathan Epstein) kept referring to Jacques as “him, or her, or whatever.”

Tod Randolph as Jacques

The main thing in favor of Ms. Randolph’s casting as Jacques was that it afforded an excellent actress an chance at a role otherwise reserved for men. We surely enjoyed her intelligent, witty delivery of some of the play’s best lines. (This was the second fine performance by a woman in a man’s role that we saw this summer; the other was Seana McKenna’s Richard III at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival.) It could also be said that conceiving Jacques as a lesbian in a society in which same-sex romances are beyond the pale helps to explain why Jacques is practically the only major character in As You Like It without a romantic partner. Or perhaps it could be said that the erotic attraction of Jacques to Celia served as a foil for the platonic affection between Rosalind and Celia.

On balance, though, this was a variation we could have done without — not having a woman play Jacques, but the conversion of Jacques into a lesbian. We are not of the school that insists that the literature of bygone years needs to be reinterpreted or “corrected” to reflect twenty-first century notions of sexuality.

Johnny Lee Davenport as Duke Senior in the Forest of Ardenne

We were very glad to see several actors we’d seen in Lenox the previous year in Richard III, including Ms. Randolph. Among the most striking feats in this show was Johnny Lee Davenport’s portrayal of both the bad Duke Frederick and his banished brother. In manner and speech, his two characters could hardly have been more contrasting; it hardly seemed possible that both the brutal Duke who banished his niece from court and the mellow, gracious Duke who welcomed Orlando to the Forest of Arden were played by the same actor. Mr. Davenport gained a spot on our list of favorite Shakespearean actors with his delivery of one of our favorite speeches in all Shakespeare: the good Duke’s ode to the pastoral life.

The star of this As You Like It was the winsome Merritt Janson, who played Rosalind as a hyper-active, quick-witted, playful bundle of sexual energy. But we are still looking for our ideal Rosalind. Ms. Janson hardly varied her tempo, and she delivered too many of her lines with the same inflections. We enjoyed Kelley Curran, as Celia/Aliena, very much, and not just for her physical comedy. And we surely hope to see Jonathan Epstein, a top-drawer veteran actor who played a superb Touchstone, in other Shakespeare roles.

Before the show, we (Emsworth and both the eldest and youngest of his three lovely, accomplished daughters) visited the former home of Shakespeare & Company at The Mount, a restored mansion that was designed and built by Edith Wharton in 1902. The Mount is only a mile or so from Shakespeare & Company’s current home at a private boys’ school. Its gardens are lovely. We couldn’t quite figure out where the plays were staged.

Richard III at Shakespeare and Company in Lenox, Mass.

John Douglas Thompson as Richard III

In a spirit of branching out, Emsworth and the Cordelia of his three daughters devoted a day to driving east to Lenox, Massachusetts to see a summer repertory company called Shakespeare and Company put on The Life and Death of King Richard III. This was a new theater destination for us; on the strength of this show, we feel strongly that these folks ought to be encouraged.

We saw Richard III in a relatively small, low-tech space (in the “Founders’ Theatre”) constructed mostly out of risers and black drapes, and sat in what might have been old church pews. But the acting, we thought, was top-notch — as good, in general, as we’ve come to expect in Niagara-on-the-Lake or Stratford.

The Founders' Theatre, with the "Rose Footprint" theater (the tent) to the right, down a hill

Richard III is the story of misanthrope Richard, Duke of Gloucester (John Douglas Thompson), who hates the world because his brother Edward, not he, is King of England, and because his physical deformities leave him unappealing to women. In two early monologues (including the play’s famous opening, “Now is the winter of our discontent . . . “), Richard boasts about his schemes to have his brother George, Duke of Clarence, put to death, and to marry a woman whose husband and father he has killed.

John Douglas Thompson, as Richard III, shamelessly urges Leia Espericueta, as Lady Anne, Warwick's youngest daughter, to marry him

Before it’s over, and as Richard murders and manipulates his way onto the throne of England, he tallies more victims than Jason in Friday the 13th. But the shock value in this show came, not so much from the death toll, but from the sheer inventiveness of Richard’s perversity. The nervous laughter from the audience when Richard cheerfully told us

I’ll marry Warwick’s youngest daughter.
What though I kill’d her husband and her father?

was just the beginning. Jaws dropped when Richard gave orders to have his brother Clarence and then his two nephews murdered. There were gasps at Richard’s cynical pretext for sending Hastings to the chopping block, and more when he kicked Hastings’s head (in a sack) around the stage.

Elizabeth Ingram as the ghostly Margaret and Nigel Gore as the Duke of Buckingham

In fact, two of the most shocking moments in the play (as we feel sure the playwright intended) didn’t even involve bloodshed and murder. We held our breath when (in Act IV, scene 2) the newly crowned Richard coolly snubbed Buckingham, his most faithful ally (Nigel Gore), when Buckingham reminded him that he’d been promised the earldom of Hereford. (“I am not in the giving vein to-day.”) And when Richard concluded his audacious request that Elizabeth (Tod Randolph) persuade her young daughter to become his next wife (Act IV, scene 4) by giving Elizabeth a sensual kiss, we felt it as a blow.

From reading the play – till now we hadn’t seen Richard III on stage – we didn’t expect much humor, if any, in the show. But director Jonathan Croy made a highly effective comic episode (Act I, scene 4) out of the efforts of Richard’s bungling hired assassins to screw up their courage to murder Clarence. He did the same with an exhilarating Baynard’s Castle scene (Act III, scene 7) in which Josh Aaron McCabe, as Catesby, an exuberant Johnny Lee Davenport, as the Lord Mayor, and Nigel Gore, as Buckingham, brilliantly manipulated a mob (and the audience in the theater, appalled but laughing) into acclaiming Richard as their new king. The scene seemed to us the reverse image of Antony’s celebrated speech to the Romans in Julius Caesar. It was great theater.

This Richard III came dangerously close to camp – but that’s what pulled the parts of this play together, we thought. Three weeks earlier, in Stratford, Ontario (see this post), we had seen another early Shakespeare play, Two Gentlemen of Verona, presented (and very effectively) more as scenes from a variety show — an entertainment — than as a narrative play. In the same way, this production of Richard III, was more a pageant of scenes from Richard’s outrageous career – melodramatic confrontations, comic episodes, a lament, non-naturalistic speeches to the audience, a battle scene — than a unified narrative.  (Is there any other Shakespeare play in which so many characters go out of their way to give their names as part of their first speeches?)  We felt that the approach brought us close to what a London audience in 1590 might have experienced.

Leia Espericueta, Zoë Laiz, and Tod Randolph as Lady Anne, Young Elizabeth, and Queen Elizabeth

We’ve read that the roles of the women in Richard III are not truly playable. That wasn’t the case here; the dazzling repartee between Richard and Anne (Leia Espericueta) in Act I, scene 2, the blistering curses of Margaret (Elizabeth Ingram) in Act I, scene 3, and the verbal fireworks between Richard and Elizabeth (Tod Randolph) in Act IV, scene 4 were all highlights.

All told, this was a lively, tightly directed show with a strong cast. Rocco Sisto, as Clarence, gave a mesmerizing rendition of Clarence’s celebrated dream about his drowning and adventures in Hades. On the printed page the various dukes and nobleman seem undifferentiated, but in this show they all had strongly individual personalities; we especially enjoyed Nigel Gore as Buckingham. The choice of John Douglas Thompson as Richard III was a case of non-traditional casting, not because Mr. Thompson is a black man, a matter of no consequence, but because, with his tall figure, agility, and imposing physical presence, he did not look at all like the deformed, undersized cripple that the playwright made Richard out to be. It was a small point to sacrifice, as Mr. Thompson was an extraordinarily convincing Richard.

Shakespeare and Company operates on the campus of the Lenox School, a private prep school situated out in the country in the Berkshires

Shakespeare and Company seems to have been around for 33 years — some friends who used to live in Stockbridge told us they saw Shakespeare from this group in an outdoor theater in the late 1970s — but the group is still a long ways from reaching the critical mass of established repertory companies like the Shaw Festival, the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, or the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. It sells only about 50,000 tickets each year, compared to about 500,000 at Stratford. Shows like The Winter’s Tale, which was also on the bill this year, have 25 performances compared to the 100 or more that the Shaw Festival might have for a play like Major Barbara.

Shakespeare and Company also seems to have ambitions that aren’t close to fruition. One of its three “theaters,” the “Rose Footprint Theatre,” is just a tent in a field that’s apparently used for shows for kids. The season publication says it’s the spot where they intend (when they get the money) to build an historically accurate reproduction of the Rose Playhouse, the London theater where Richard III may have been first performed.

We must complain about the the program for this show, in which the cast of characters confusingly had the actors on the left and the characters on the right. Needless to say, this makes it hard to sneak a glance, in the middle of the performance, to see who’s playing what.