Some Aversions to Pastoral

ANDREI BELGRADER'S As You Like It takes the aggressively self-confident stance that no one--not Shakespeare, not his audiences, certainly not today's audiences--could or can stomach pastoral. This production gleefully aims groin-kicks at each of the text's literary conventions, until their prone bodies threaten to outnumber the actors on stage. Whether Belgrader remains faithful to some indeterminate "author's intentions" or in fact manhandles the play for his own purposes, the final product impartially communicates the matter of Shakespeare's discourse on love, while obliquely making its own points. A deft maneuver.

Shakespeare's design for As You Like It is one of his most transparent: a sketchy framework of undeveloped plot hangs at both ends of the play as an excuse to get the characters into the forest of Arden, where the complex interplay of nearallegorical characters assumes the aspect, at times, of a philosophical inquiry. A banished duke holds court over a pastoral golden age in the forest; his men pluck the lute, sing, and sleep while Jaques the melancholiac provides counterpoint to their contentment. Into their hermetically enchanted realm bound a pair of lovers, whose parabolic approaches give Shakespeare an excuse to examine the nature of obligation and fidelity in love.

Belgrader will have none of that. In this American Rep production, he leaves the issues in the play to speak for themselves and devotes his energies exclusively to the play's formal frame, tapping on some rotting beams and occasionally taking ax to them. His chosen weapon is extravagant caricature: never was the difference between court and greenwood so violently underscored. Where a straight production might present an orderly, ceremonious court and a rustically relaxed forest, Belgrader gives neither. His court is a Louis XIV anachronism, the women nearly immobile in skirts like giant hat-boxes, the men waving white kerchiefs and gloves to punctuate their mincing. Arden is a small businessman's Hawaii vacation-dream; the Duke and his entourage wear leis and grass skirts like conventioneers just off the plane.

It is with this parodic version of pastoral that Belgrader achieves his greatest success, a triple irony that reinforces Shakespeare's own distrust of the pastoral mode, mocks his reluctant dependence on it in As You Like It, and turns the ART production into a perpetual round of high and low humor. The pastoral that prospered at the Elizabethan court was a revival of a classical form that set highly refined city-dwellers writing highly refined poetry about a subject they were generally ignorant of, the countryside. At their best, the pastoral poets created extremely allusive, elegant verse; at their worst, they produced tedious doggerel. It is on the latter that Belgrader and his company choose to gaze--as an anthology of bad pastoral included in the program forewarns.

Embodied on stage, this selective vision of pastoral proves hilarious. Take Belgrader's constant play on the so-called "pathetic fallacy"--the idea that nature responds to human emotion. Five young girls clad in fake-looking foliage represent the whispering forest, and their carefully timed reactions provide some of the show's funniest moments: dozing off during the recitation of tiresome love poetry, moaning and panting as the handsome Orlando passes among them, leaning over as if to puke during an especially noxious dance number from the cow-girl Audrey. They are funny in themselves, and funny for their ludicrously literal representation of pastoral convention.

THE ART ACTORS seem entirely in tune with Belgrader's approach. Standouts in the almost uniformly excellent company include Thomas Derrah's lightning-tongued Touchstone and Richard Spore as the older shepherd Corin, with a voice as flat as Indiana. Jeremy Geidt takes the roles of both dukes, usurper and sylvan exile, by storm: he gives the former a spoiled-child bossiness and, right before the intermission, some stage business that is genius; the latter becomes a flabby, affected patriarch who can't pronounce his "r"s and who jigs off in a trance like some elderly discohopper at the end.

Of the women, Cherry Jones's Rosalind clearly deserves her position as Shakespeare's ringmaster. The most commanding of the performers, she plays woman or man with equal ardor, courtly fixture or cottager with equal ease. Karen MacDonald's Celia matches Jones movement for movement with a perfectly synchronized body and a beautifully tuned voice. But the most ingratiating of the performances is Gerry Bamman's Jaques, a tall forest roamer in a grass toga, unfazed by even the most outrageous of Belgrader's devices, with a pouting, resonant voice that undoubtedly reminded more than one member of the audience of Tony Randall. Bored, not spiteful, puzzled rather than offended by the folly around him, he delivers the set-piece "seven ages of man" speech with weltschmertz instead of venom.

The only serious problem with this As You Like It stems from the very overflow of energy that makes each individual characterization so effective. The ART troupe comes to the Loeb fresh from an outdoor staging of the show at City Plaza, and its dimensions haven't been properly scaled down. Some carefully planned comic routines fail to connect because of gestures that are too large, movements too exaggerated, timing off. When Rosalind decides to flee the court with her confidante, the women give a victory whoop that flies into the air and then falls with a clunk on the stage.

These are flaws of excess, however, not misdirection, and as the cast adjusts to the new location they may disappear. Either way, this production has an abundance of invention, mirroring Shakespeare's that insures its success. Making fun of the playwright is a dangerous game for directors; it runs the risk of suggesting to audiences that there's no value to the play, and no point in staging it. But Belgrader manages to ridicule Shakespeare's implements with the same stroke that affirms his comic genius.

An apparition that haunts the final scene at the Loeb epitomizes his achievement. Modern directors of this play face an annoying problem--Shakespeare's inclusion of an actress representing Hymen to cement the multiple marriages at the end. Much of today's audience can't even identify which deity that is, and the idea of a nuptial goddess seems inapposite to this As You Like It's earthiness, anyway. Belgrader breathes coarse, jocular humor into the tired device, turning Hymen into an earth-mother who rises on an elevator, with four false breasts, giant phalluses sticking medusa-like from her head, and a leer like an old gypsy. She is a bit of a shock--even somewhat unnerving--but like the rest of this As You Like It, her audacity, pointedness and farcicality eventually prove winning.