As You Like It

Abstract

Reviewed by: As You Like It Cason Murphy As You Like It Presented by Flagstaff Shakespeare Festival. Streamed digitally at flag-shakes.org, 11–27 September 2020. Directed by James Cougar Canfield. Avatar and Sprite design by Nathan Leigh. Costumes by Hannah Fontes. Editing and original music by Sean Golightly. Stage management by Becki Zaritsky. With Bill Chameides (Duke Frederick/Duke Senior), Hannah Fontes (Celia), Gustavo Flores (Touchstone), Keith Hale (Oliver), Rapheal Hamilton (William/Brother Jacques/Lord), Ryan L. Jenkins (Orlando), Nick Marchetti (Charles/Phoebe), Jacob Nichols (Silvius), Suze St. John (Adam/Corin), Melissa Toomey (Jacques), Audrey Young (Audrey/Le Beau), and Becki Zaritsky (Rosalind). Flagstaff Shakespeare Festival’s recent virtual production of As You Like It gives new meaning to Jaques’s musing that “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players” (2.7.140–1). In this case, these players are quarantined actors inhabiting 16-bit character avatars who navigate a pixelated Forest of Arden that evokes the nostalgia and aesthetics of role-playing video games from the early 1990s. This metatheatrical production concept, devised by director James Cougar Canfield, emerged in response to a need to shift Flagstaff Shakespeare’s repertory model online as COVID-19 rapidly spread during the pre-production period. With company members sheltering in place across the country, Canfield took cues from memories of watching his mother play Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past as a child, as well as his own daily practice of exploring the idyllic wilds of Animal Crossing: New Horizons during the early phase of quarantine. Here, the imagined vintage computer game As You Like It acts as a recursive metaphor for the production—becoming its own green world to provide the twelve performers of the ensemble an escape from the doldrums of self-isolation. [End Page 283] The opening moment of the production features a charming framing device focused on Becki Zaritsky, the actor who plays Rosalind. The audience, positioned as if watching from the screen of Zartisky’s computer, watches a largely silent dumb show as she enters her real-world bedroom and casually checks her phone, only to find a message that spurs her to plug in her gaming headset and log onto the game. After a few keystrokes, she slowly draws her eyes up to us and flashes a fourth wall-breaking smile before Sean Golightly’s pitch-perfect synthesized main theme fades in over the title screen of the game. Not only does this sequence effectively center Zaritsky-as-Rosalind as our primary focus, but it also provides a quaint analog frontispiece which will be bookended by her sublime delivery of Rosalind’s epilogue, delivered in the same setting. Following a genre-perfect scrolling text exposition detailing Duke Frederick’s usurpation and exile of Duke Senior, the production completes Rosalind’s digital transformation with the selection of her Renaissance-styled avatar. Moving into the narrative proper, Canfield’s vision nicely allows the company to similarly re-envision the major moments of Shakespeare’s text within the framework of RPG (role-playing game) mechanics. In Oliver’s first confrontation with Orlando, upon the utterance of “Wilt thou lay hands on me, villain?,” a traditional turn-based combat sequence launches and the performers strategically select from options including PUNCH, SLASH, and HEAL. This gameplay mechanic is expertly deployed at the playtext’s two other moments of danger—during the setpiece wrestling match pitting Orlando against Charles in 1.2, and later in a fully hilariously realized boss battle between Orlando and the lioness, which precedes Oliver’s melodramatic recollection of the event for Rosalind-as-Ganymede and Celia-as-Aliena in 4.3. With only a dozen actors at hand to cover the twenty-two named characters in the Folio playtext, many clever choices of doubling are made. Some of these pairings have precedent in the play’s performance history—Suze St. John brings wisdom and gentility to her doubling of Adam and Corin, both ready to serve to the “last gasp with truth and loyalty” (2.3.70); and Bill Chameides differentiates his stately Duke Senior from the dastardly Duke Frederick with a particularly wild, monitor-chewing...