A tyrant has seized power.
He is chipping away at his peoples’ rights; he is banishing anyone he chooses, exiling them from the place they call home. His court has become violent, a place steeped in paranoia and distrust.
This is the state of the world at the top of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” — but the play isn’t as bleak as its setting might suggest. In fact, “As You Like It” is not a tragedy, but a comedy and romance, a story that’s ultimately about escaping, rebuilding, and finding community. That theme felt apt, Commonwealth Shakespeare Company’s Founding Artistic Director Steven Maler said, and that’s why the play has been selected for the 29th season of CSC’s Shakespeare on the Common. Performances, which are free to attend on Boston Common, will run from July 23 through Aug. 10.
“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 Celia, 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.
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.
“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.
“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, commshakes.org
This article has been updated to correct the name of the character Celia.