All eyes on Orlando in ‘As You Like It’
“As You Like It” is typically regarded as having, in Rosalind, one of the best roles for women in all of Shakespeare, a belief borne out by the sheer numbers. She has 1,000 more lines than any of the Bard’s other female characters, in part because she spends much of the play disguised as a man, first to escape an unfeeling uncle and then to test a potential husband. It’s not just a hefty part; it’s one with the wit of a trickster. For every conversational thrust, Rosalind has a ready parry, one that immediately makes folly out of any sparring partner’s gambit.
But in California Shakespeare Theatre’s production of the romantic comedy, seen Wednesday, May 31, it’s not the heroine who stands out. Jessika D. Williams is serviceable in the role, and it’s refreshing to see a Rosalind who isn’t dainty but vigorous. She owns the part when Rosalind gets to be lusty, tough or socially awkward, but too often with the wordplay she seems to be rising and falling in pitch and volume only to create aural variety, not because the text or her character’s feeling demands it.
But it’s her beloved, Orlando, who commands notice, though he’s a relatively slim part among Shakespeare’s male lovers. He’s a wrestler in the first part of the play and a very bad poet in the second; mostly, he’s an excuse for Rosalind to stun us with her verbal dexterity.
Played by Patrick Russell, though, the role could be the play’s protagonist. The young actor has been a reliably strong contributor to the Bay Area theater scene since he was a student in ACT’s master’s of fine arts program, but in this often dismissed part, he achieves a new degree of thoughtfulness and subtlety. Tearing into the show’s opening monologue, about his mistreatment by his elder brother Oliver (Craig Marker), he briefly makes the comedy feel like “King Lear,” so ravaged is he by rage. It’s left him shifty, jittery, so liable to combust as to render the Bruns Amphitheater his own emotional tinderbox. That’s until he regards Rosalind for the first time, and his whole being softens. Throughout the play, especially the first half, his performance is a welcome reminder that actors can always translate Shakespeare’s twisty syntax, all his jokes specific to Elizabethan England, when they make themselves slaves, fools to each new feeling.
A few of the other performers in director Desdemona Chiang’s cast achieve similar heights, especially Patty Gallagher as simpleton Audrey and other comic parts. In her hands, clowning doesn’t just give easy laughs; it becomes the show’s sharpest tool for defining characters, relationships and situations.
But especially when Rosalind and her cousin Celia (Maryssa Wanlass) skedaddle from the court of Duke Frederick ( James Carpenter) to the Forest of Arden, too many of the relationships among small characters are unclear. The problem isn’t Chiang’s high concept, which transposes Shakespeare’s woodland to a contemporary homeless encampment; it’s that the production seems to take it for granted that we know who each new jester is and why we should care about them.
Some of Chiang’s choices undermine her strong ones. Jomar Tagatac makes the famous “All the world’s a stage” speech a poignant lament for the human condition, delivering the whole thing as if to say, “Is that all there is for us?” Then, jarringly, the cast launches into a hokey reprise of “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” as if fearful we might linger too long in despair.
A little more despair would be preferable; too often, this production feels like filler.