June 6th - October 4

For Good

Three cheers to the Bard for gracing us with this delightful rom-com, where good holds center stage. It all takes flight with our charming catalyst. Ah, Rosalind, literally discovering poetry in trees and sweeping everyone she meets into her delightful orbit. Well, almost everyone. But this tale is a forgiving one, and the woods provide a delightful haven to discover our best selves. Rife with romance, poetry and possibility, with notes of Midsummer, you’ll head down the Hill feeling like the world is a better place. And don’t we all deserve that?

Synopsis

Rosalind and Celia are best friends and cousins. But when Celia’s father, the Duke, begins to see Rosalind as a threat to his daughter’s future prosperity, the two women don disguises, with Rosalind pretending to be a boy named Ganymede, and escape to the Forest of Arden. Meanwhile, Orlando, a young gentleman who had previously fallen for Rosalind, is also forced to flee to that very same forest. There, he meets “Ganymede,” who promises to teach him how to woo Rosalind. All that plus a band of merry forest-dwelling misfits make for a great Shakespearean comedy.

Season Select: As You Like It

Director's Note

“The quest for human supremacy has been fueled by a need for domination and control. The end result is a species-wide crusade against nature that values obedience and conformity, profit and power, and order above everything else…

In all of nature there is nothing more powerful than the prayer of a single blade of grass. Given a crack and a thimbleful of dirt, it will shatter a sidewalk, crumble the asphalt of a highway, and bring even the highest building down to the ground.” - The Way of the Rose by Clark Strand and Perdita Finn

The journey of this story begins in a male-dominated world: two sets of brothers at odds, power seized and abused, a violent wrestling match being celebrated and on display for the public. Before we make our way to the forest, we witness banishment, cruelty and broken ribs. And yet, it is very decidedly a comedy. A wildly romantic one at that.

Shakespeare reminds us over and over again in this play that we are at all times more than just one thing. Consistently, he turns to the literary device of Hendiadys (literally “One by means of two”). They are scattered throughout this play and even more so when he writes Hamlet the same year (ie. “the book and volume of my brain”). He’s asking us to work a little harder as listeners; to remember that we are all more complicated than we think we are; universally capable of holding two truths at once. We are - all of us - both masculine and feminine, tame and wild, young and old. Love, the word used most often in this play, is defined by Silvius almost entirely by the use of these dualistic poetic images: “Sighs and Tears, Faith and Service, Patience and Impatience.”

Removed from the rigid structures of court and power, the characters start to hold more complexity as they enter the Forest of Arden. They are allowed to find freedom in nature and follow instincts that aren’t perfectly ordered. They bloom.

When we reach the appearance of the love god Hymen (literally meaning “stitched together”), we are in the midst of a springtime festival honoring love, sex and the cycles of nature that will sustain the land and perhaps carry forth the next generation. In our production, Hymen has been created by the people of the community as a kind of blessing because, as the story makes clear, love is not something that we can sustain alone.

We invite you to take part in the blessing. To celebrate this play in these woods. With the mosquitoes AND the stars. The rain and the wind. The sun and the moon.

- Laura Rook, Director of As You Like It