I forged out into the bitter cold to catch the 7:30 p.m. performance of Shakespeare’s As You Like It at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Overall, it was very well done: genuinely funny dialogue (it’s a comedy, after all), minimal yet appropriate sets, with cleverly designed lighting and projections to recreate the Forest of Arden, where most of the play takes place. The director knows his stuff; he’s Sir Peter Hall, former head of Britain’s National Theatre and a Tony award-winner for the original Amadeus.
Unfortunately, however, his 22-year-old daughter played Rosalind, the female lead. In general, I didn’t like her overexcited performance, with its breathy phrasing and needless extension of the last syllable in each sentence. She reminded me of Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare In Love or Emma—just a bit too dramatically British, so filled with wide-eyed wonder for the world that she’s in danger of bursting and besmirching the front row with a syrupy goo. On a positive note, her initial meetings with her interest, Orlando, were well played with the physicality of a young couple hesitant in love.
Those scenes, along with some of the hammier roles (particularly Touchstone the jester and Jaques, the world-weary curmudgeon who gets the famous “All the world’s a stage” speech) reminded me well that reading Shakespeare’s plays, as so many are forced to do in high school, is an exercise in futility. They were never meant to be read; they are meant to be seen performed, with everything Shakespeare never specified: detailed stage direction; pauses, timing and phrasing; body language, gestures and interaction; the use of props and song; and many other nuances. Even if 400-year-old unrhymed iambic pentameter makes you squinty with incomprehension, the best performances of his plays reveal the dialogue through action; you may not understand all the words, but you get the gist through the performance. This version of As You Like It certainly fit the bill in this respect.
I was also reminded that for every phrase Shakespeare gave us or popularized, he provided others that still stir the mind. On the greatest-hits side, in As You Like It alone (one of his “lesser” plays, no less), we get “laid on with a trowel,” “motley fool,” “we have seen better days,” “neither rhyme nor reason,” “too much of a good thing” and “for ever and a day.”
But we also get fresh observations on life and love (Rosalind’s “how
full of briers is this working-day world!” and Orlando’s “What passion hangs these weights upon my tongue?/I cannot speak to her, yet she urged conference.”), brief and beautifully turned descriptions (“desert inaccessible”), ruminations on growing old (“my age is as a lusty winter/Frosty, but kindly”) and quips I’d like to add to my everyday speech. On the subway, for example, I yearn to shout, “Sweep on, you fat and greasy citizens.”
I went to the theater directly from work, and not having had any dinner, my tummy was making angry noises ’round ’bout 10:30 when the play ended. I went back to Manhattan to Diner 24 (102 Eighth Ave. at W. 15th Street). The décor is Midwestern retro-pop, with portions of exposed, rough stone wall reminding me of the Big Boy restaurants from my childhood. The place specializes in “comfort food,” classics like meatloaf, chicken pot pies and something called Disco Fries. I had the Cuban sandwich and it was O.K., but a bit dry and unflavorful. The highlight was the caipirinha I drank, which swept my memories momentarily back to Brazil.
I left the diner around 1:00 a.m., and on my ride back home, I sat across from a bum stretched out sleeping over four seats stickered with the MTA’s strictly ornamental “Priority Seating/for persons with disabilities” labels. He was perched precariously close to the edge, and like clockwork, at the W. 66th Street stop, he rolled right off and gently hit the floor. (Being New York, no one in the car gave this sudden development any more than a passing glance, if that.) But there were no injuries to this motley fool, because at that point, with him splayed confusedly on the ground, I could see he was wearing no fewer than two pairs of pants and at least three sweatshirts. He lay there silently for awhile, as if pondering this cruel fate, then got back up, stretched out again across the seats and fell back asleep.
