Murray Ross

As YouLike It #10: Phoebe, Phoebe,Phoebe!

Midway through the play, Rosalind and Celia are invited to witness a "pageant truly play'd" between "the pale complexion of true love/ And the red glow of proud disdain."  And on cue, enter Silvius and Phoebe, who offer yet another study in  love's folly.  He's the faithful shepherd, delicate and love sick; she's his cruel and disdainful mistress, who, as Rosalind says, insults and exults over the wretched.  The pageant they play is a parody of scenes familiar to Elizabethan audiences, who loved their pastoral as we love our westerns.  Today, the scene feels a bit like a parody of the erotic world of Dominance and submission, which also features "scenes" (usually played out in dungeons, though forests might work too).

As You Like It#11 If I were a woman

We've been talking about the end of the play, especially the end of Rosalind. She's the chattiest girl in Shakespeare, but once she appears in her wedding gown, she becomes almost completely silent.  Feminists have been understandably alarmed. Could this mean that once Rosalind returns to her traditional gender role she enters into wifely submission, like Katherine, the tamed shrew? Will she live henceforth meek and barefoot in Orlando's country house?  A question to be asked.

As You Like It #9--Men with horns

Guys in Shakespeare are all sure their wives are cheating on them.  If your wife hasn't cheated yet, she soon will.  She's going to want something more, someone who's more of a man than you.  So, sooner or later, all married men grow horns on their foreheads.  They're there for everyone to see and laugh at, except for the man wearing them, who's always the last to know. Horns!  The mark of the cuckold.  The shame and inevitable fate of the ordinary husband.

As You Like It #8 Busting Out

At last: lights, set, costumes, props, action--all together in one place for the first time. Very scary. Even though we've thought about each in detail, when they combine it's always a surprise. Oh, THAT'S what Arden looks like!  Seeing the pink sleeping bag next to Celia's green jumper I realized we had a mannerist forest--right out of Pontormo.  But a scene later it was something else entirely.  I was worried about the lightness of the stage floor, which under the lights risked being brighter than the faces of the actors, a classic theatre no no. But the more we looked the more we liked it.  Our Arden is a playground, a circus floor, a sandbox, where people come to play and perform and watch each other play and perform.

As You Like It #7: Hey Nonino

As You Like It is famous for its songs, and the most famous song of them all is "It was a Lover and his lass." This great diitty hit the top of the charts when its setting by the composer Thomas Morely was published in his First Book of Ayres in 1600--it may have been the music used in the play's first performance.  The song has its own little scene, and the scene exists just for the song.  Touchstone and Audrey enter talking about their imminent marriage, and they are met by two kids we've never seen before, soon identified as two of the Duke's pages. Touchstone asks them for a song, which the pages then promptly sing. The pages were obviously two ringers from one of the boy schools; they were very good singers.  But when they are finished, Touchstone tells them they were out of tune and their song was a waste of time.  He ushers Audrey offstage, living the discomfited and miffed kids to follow after. There you have it.  This little scene has been giving us fits.

As You Like It #6: Great Reckoning in a Little Room

Everytime I send a cast into tech rehearsals I worry they'll come unglued. The process is so long and tedious the play itself cannot hold-- it's really not together yet anyway.  On Saturday morning we couldn't use the theater because we were dismantling and recreating the set (see AYL #5), so I took our cast downstairs to the Osborne Studio, a small room, for a group reading of the play.  We sat around in a circle, and the actors moved into the center to play when they were on stage.  It was a chance to learn that we are really all in the same show, since most of the time the characters are offstage, busy elsewhere writing poems, tending their flocks, camping out, finding sermons in stones, fools in the forest, hunting deer, meeting old religious men, or picnicking with goatherds.  The play itself presents only a few of the many encounters it mentions.  Here are some pictures I took during this rehearsal.  They'll give you some idea of what the forest of Arden feels like just now, two weeks before we open, a time when we are trying to find the pulse of the play.

As You Like It #5: Train Wrecks and Arrivals

For complicated reasons, tech week comes early to our Shakespeare Festival--after two weeks of rehearsal--well ahead of normal procedure around here.  And tech, that time when the scenic elements first encounter each other, is always fraught with peril.  That's partly because lights and sound and scenic design are all discrete disciplines.  And it's also because, in regional theater these days, the lighting and scenic designers are likely to come from different places and to have communicated only by fax, internet and tele-conferences.  Not so bad--but there's nothing like the real thing, the moment when the the theoretical becomes the actual. So when lights meet sound during tech, to quote our play, sometimes it's as violent and "sudden as the fight of two rams." 

As You Like It #4: Miss Nebraska

Any decent director will tell you that casting is at least 80% of the job, and in some plays casting your lead is most of the casting.  You'd be crazy to do Hamlet, without  knowing in advance who's your Prince of Denmark, or Richard III without a clue about who's going to be your guy with the hump. The same is true for casting Rosalind in As You Like It.  The play is not hers alone, but it's certainly more hers than anyone's.  She has more lines than any woman character in Shakespeare. And they are good lines too. She's Shakespeare's most gifted comic heroine, and, as Harold Bloom says, "as remarkable in her mode as Falstaff and Hamlet are in theirs."  In other words, it's a pretty good role.  But as recently as two months ago I had no idea who our Rosalind might be.

As You Like It #3-Some Picnic

Each year I forget that working on a Shakespeare play is unlike working on any other. I've divided the script into 29 different "scenes" for rehearsal purposes.  But what I relearn every summer is that each Shakespeare scene is a complete play, which means you could rehearse it forever--or at last as long as a play.   Take, for example, the first scene between Touchstone, the clown, and his girlfriend.   They are one of four "country copulatives" who'll be joned in matrimony at the end of the play The scene is a 100 lines long--but it's a complete little play. A very quirky little play too, like almost everything else in Arden.

As You Like It #2-- Clowning Around

Hamlet famously advises the players he is directing to control their funny men.  "Let those that play your clowns speak more than is set down form them," he says, "for there be of them that will them selves laught toset on some quantity of barren spectators to laught too, though in the the mean timessome necessary question of the play be then to be considered.  That's villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it." Clowns, he says, are loose cannons on stage.  And boy, is Hamlet right.

As You Like It #1-- Talking the Talk

We've just finished our first week of Shakespeare rehearsals,spending our time sitting at tables reading the play.  Not much happens in AS YOU LIKE IT.  Some good people are banished from an oppressive court; they flee and find liberty and love in the forest of Arden. Then they all get married and go home.  While in In the woods, they talk and talk and talk. Mostly the talk is about love, but not always. Years ago, when I first directed the play, I called Professor Stephen Booth at Berkeley, as I always do, to get my bearings and sound out the guru.  I thought I was on safe ground when I began by saying, "this is a play about love, right?" "No," said he,  "it's a play about lists."

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