‘As You Like It’ and ‘Richard II’ at Quintessence Theatre Group

In As You Like It, Orlando (Alan Brincks) is a wrestler-poet who plasters his verses onto trees and rolls in ready to fight to the death over an apple or two, when asking nicely would probably suffice. Love takes the merest (preferably shirtless) glance, a prodigious pair of breasts is grounds for immediate marriage, and who cares whether you’re in the castle or the sheepcote: What’s the difference between a courtier’s sweat and the grease in a ewe’s fleece?

Earth and gloves, gloves and earth

In Richard II, the seldom-performed prequel to the Henry IVs, there’s barely enough time to plot, petition the kings, and throw down angry gloves between all the worshipping of England’s soil, digging of graves with tears, and bemoaning the blood-soaked earth.

“For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings,” James-Patrick Davis’s King Richard decrees.

Davis plays the lachrymose speechifier Jaques in As You Like It, longing for some proper motley, as well as a magnetic Richard: tart and lackadaisical, boyish but regal, petulant yet tragically dignified.

If you’re not familiar with Bolingbroke’s rise to power in the great arc of England’s royal history as told by Shakespeare, just try to keep up as more leather gauntlets hit the deck than dead royals in the banquet hall of Elsinore.

Enough with the music

Burns’s Richard II is designed and directed very much in the mold of his recent Shakespeare tragedies, including last year’s stripped-down Hamlet and a similarly all-male Othello. Burns provides the same set for both of the current shows (a high, narrow maze of scaffolding at the back of the stage) and the sound design for Richard II. His formula for swift, sleekly punctuated action in Shakespeare’s dramas seems to vary little between productions: Trios or quartets of men in tighter formation than Canada geese fleeing the Polar Vortex march on and off stage to bursts of pounding music (even an interlude of just a few seconds gets its own propulsive sound cue).

All the noise seems like the antithesis of Burns’s suggestion in the curtain speech to allow our ears to “acclimate themselves” to the language as the centerpiece of the experience — especially given the homage Burns and his text coach, Josh Carpenter, pay to the iambic pentameter.

Intermission overload?

But these productions are worth experiencing. Ian Rose offers much fine, full-bodied grappling in his fight choreography for both shows. Sean Close stands out with boisterous, slippery charm as the Forest of Arden’s resident fool, Touchstone, mugging so much that he even manages to steal the obligatory final group dance.

Burns breaks the show into four segments, each separated by a brief intermission (ostensibly in the true tradition of the original Shakespeare experience). Close shepherds the performance along with all the wily aplomb of a jaded wedding singer, and various cast members take to the stage for karaoke-style ditties like Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball” (from a fiercely corseted Ryan Walter as the lusty shepherdess, Audrey).

The selling of sundry beverages at each intermission may, on its own, render the frequent breaks necessary depending on how much beer you can hold while giggling. And the leisurely format underscores the easygoing, episodic nature of the story.

But if Burns wants to offer time to stretch our legs during the comedy for the sake of relating to the original groundlings, I wonder why Richard II gets no such consideration, with the single intermission we’re all used to.

Back to the beginning? Or not?

It’s one of many questions you could ask about the execution of both these plays, walking a wavering line between back-to-the-roots Shakespeare and contemporary gloss.

When many modern production elements remain, why insist on all-male casts when roles for the ladies in the classics are scarce as it is? And if you’re going to cast men for the sake of that back-to-originals feel, can adult dudes do it justice, instead of the teen boys who would’ve donned dresses in the Bard’s day? In the role of Rosalind, Alexander Harvey’s Adam’s apple is visible from the back row, alongside Andrew Betz’s winning Celia.

And if men are going to play the ladies, why can’t they all be real people, instead of a few earnestly played women alongside a few men in drag for laughs, shellacked with lipstick?

The costumes, though beautifully constructed by Jane Casanave, may leave audiences with a similar 21st-century dilemma.

“What shall I do with my doublet and hose?” Rosalind cries when she discovers her love, Orlando, has taken to the forest just as she’s gone undercover as a man named Ganymede. We can’t take her plaint literally: She’s in jeans, a T-shirt, and Chuck Taylors.

Similarly, instead of stylistic differences consistent with the same period to delineate Bolingbroke’s more austere followers from Richard’s velvety court, the warring factions appear to be have been attired in different centuries. Richard and his retinue get hose and flowing jackets and capes, while Bolingbroke and pals strut in modern-style suits.

Short of time travel, nobody’s bringing the premieres of these plays back to life. So it’s always interesting to watch what self-professed traditionalist directors hold onto, and what they don’t, and wonder why this or that old-fashioned choice made the cut, alongside a 21st-century flourish.

Above right: Sean Close (as Touchstone), Carlo Campbell (as Sir Oliver), and Ryan Walter (as Audrey) in As You Like It. (Photo by Shawn May)