Shakespeare in Clark Park presents As You Like It

Ontaria Kim Wilson’s adaptation is meant to resonate with modern themes: exile from home, injustice, and gender-bending. But while the text doesn’t always offer support, Wilson’s approach still works for a bawdy, touching romance with several love triangles and a gleeful subversion of social norms. Consider, for instance, how Rosalind in the early 17th century would have been played by a man, playing a woman, disguised as a man for much of the text.

Dukes and daughters in exile

The plot kicks off with two pairs of noble brothers locked in conflict. Frederick (Jason Lindner) takes the duchy from his older brother, Duke Senior (T.C. Caldwell), and banishes him, though Senior’s daughter Rosalind (Cheyenne Parks) is allowed to stay in court because Frederick’s daughter Celia (Felicity Mundy) is her closest friend. Meanwhile, the young gentleman Orlando (Tariq Kanu) and his older servant Adam (Michael Ming) must flee their home so he isn’t attacked by his angry older brother, Oliver (Annie Zulick). But first, Orlando immediately falls in love with Rosalind.

The usurping duke Frederick finally exiles Rosalind, too, but Celia decides to go with her, joined by the fool Touchstone (Walter Dodd). Rosalind disguises herself as a young man named Ganymede, and the trio arrives in the Forest of Arden among other exiles, including Rosalind’s father and Orlando. “Ganymede” must then teach the clueless Orlando how to properly court Rosalind while also dealing with several love triangles—and quadrangles—among the forest’s shepherds and nobility.

Zippy energy

This all sounds ludicrously complicated, but that’s part of the fun of Shakespeare’s comedies. If King Lear spins a grave tragedy out of the ensemble’s quick alliances and machinations, As You Like It creates giddy absurdity, where four different characters—Ganymede, Orlando, Silvius (Christopher David Roche), and Phoebe (Camille E. Young)—are desperate for each other’s devotion during the climactic scenes. Add Touchstone, William (Zenande Simani), and Audrey’s (Katherine Perry) love triangle, and you get a play about how love’s power renders everyone fools, shepherds and nobility alike.

Wilson’s production is backed by a talented cast game for anything, especially Perry’s scene-stealing Audrey and Roche doing double duty as Silvius and the melancholy Jaques. The minimal staging, aided by Vic Gill-Gomez’s scenic design, correctly goes fast and loose with the material. This is famously a musical comedy, and the more recent songs and fun, zippy energy are a good match for a story about desire, where the reversals of expectation and longing seem endless. How else to present a show which ends with a happy dance party?

Delaware in 2034?

In her opening-night curtain speech and in the press notes, Wilson gave the setting as “Arden, Delaware circa 2034” while emphasizing the text’s connections to modern oppression and displacement. But this doesn’t quite fit the play itself, or its presentation. There are absolutely political themes at work here, especially class and gender: Rosalind-as-Ganymede courts Orlando, not the other way around, disrupting social norms. Much is made too of “perfumed” courtly manners versus the harmony of nature and the pastoral life. But this is fundamentally a light romantic comedy, featuring exiles more akin to Henry Tudor or Charles II, not refugees fleeing geopolitical horrors. If this production is truly intended to be a “lens” through which to view modern dystopian life, it doesn’t stick the landing.

The Clark Park production may not succeed as a comment on “our” current predicament, but it’s truly a success as a funny, joyful comedy that knows when to emphasize the rare dramatic beats. Adam’s gratitude for the shepherds’ food and shelter is the only moment here that actively echoes the desperation of 21st-century exile, and Jaques choosing to join Frederick in exile at the end—“I am for other than for dancing measures”—is still deeply touching. Not everybody has it in their nature to love or seek pleasure, or even to stay in a happy community. Everyone else, lovers and families alike, can see this new version of As You Like It.