As You Like It

For the would-be impressario, As You Like It must inevitably seem of all Shakespeare's comedies the most attractive--witness the plethora of productions of the play this summer. Who would not be enticed by a play that both avoids those different boisterous scenes of, say, Love's Labours Lost, eschews that nasty embroilment of plot that so constantly threatens the serenity of Much Ado About Nothing, and yet retains all the good humor and easy-going appeal of both of these earlier works? High comedy, the highest, in fact, like the magnificent series of exchanges of devotion in Act V. Scene 3: "And so am I for Phebe." "And so am I for Ganymede." "And so am I for Rosalind." "And so I for no woman," without the encumbrances of a plot. For the plot is happily forgotten after the first act, and everyone (or at least everyone at all important in the play) is free to fleet carelessly in the golden world of Arden. Nor do the fleeting characters present much of a problem: Shakespeare has delineated their roles with a screne certainly. Rosalind, so "full of voluble, laughing grace" (the phrase is Hazlitt's), dominates the forest, and her own investigation of the pastoral tradition is accompanied by the parallel but ultimately limited investigations of the comedy's two commentators, the material fool, Touchstone, and the melancholic traveler, Jaques.

There is, in short, absolutely nothing in the play that any director could possibly fear. With the proper number of scripts and an equal set of actors--who need do little more than articulate distinctly--good sets and a brisk pace, his succeeds is assured. With these minimum requirements, the comedy must prove almost irresistible; no Shakespeare play could be less dispiriting.

John Hancock's production of As You Like It, the current offering of the Harvard Summer Players certainly fulfills and overfulfills these minimum criteria. Most of the actors both knew their lines and were able to speak them quite clearly. And, of course, not a few of them are a good deal better than that. As Rosalind, Jane Quigley is lively, deft, and confident. If her manly colloquialisms as the youth Ganymede occasionally savor more of the Bronx than of the Home Counties, why it is all spirited and very amusing.

Theodore Kazanoff, the melancholic Jaques, is, if anything too good for his part. Mr. Kazanoff finds it difficult to remain sufficiently four, and with his evident acting skill be often unconsciously upstages other actors, notably Peter Gesell who makes Touchstone little more than a fugitive from the Old Howard. perhaps the production would have been improved by Mr. Kazanoff's trading roles with Tom Griffin, whose Orlando, far from being ebullient, is dour and grumpy enough for a Richard III or an Edmund. (Mr. Griffin, sad to say, has been beset by two of the continuing Terrors of all Shakespearean acting: the Noble Voice, which attempts to sound English and inspiring and most closely resembles muffled Gielgud, and the Emphatic Shimmy, apparently an attempt to lend emphasis to a speech by wriggling one's body wildly.)

As for the others, Paul Barstow's quiet and noble Duke Senior, Richard Conrad's tuneful Amiens and Maggie Zizkind's pert, English-sparrowish Celia merit attention and more space than I can give them.

The other criteria that I postulated earlier were met by Mr. Hancock whose direction was quick, witty, and ever resourceful, and by Ian Strasfogel, whose all-purpose sets evoked the court of France and the forest of Arden with equal grace and imagination. In fine, it was a pleasant evening, and that it was not a particularly challenging one for either actors or audience is really not a reasonable ground for complaint. I cannot complain.