Love's Labors

throughout the play, turning up in the THE THEATRE woods, around the campfire, even in the trees. They deliver “As You Like It” ’s essential ingredient: a festive spirit. LOVE’S LABORS As a director, Sullivan is strong on pre- sentation, not penetration. Here he clev- Delusion and confusion in “As You Like It” and “3C.” erly wrangles a crowd-pleasing show; his flamboyant directorial choices, however, BY JOHN LAHR come at the price of nuance. Shakespeare’s play calls for a contrast between the cor- ruption of the court, with its bustling fops and courtiers—“O how full of briars is this working-day world!” Rosalind (Lily Rabe) complains—and the freedom of the natural world. “Here feel we not the penalty of Adam,” the deposed and ban- ished Duke Senior says of his Arcadian bliss (in a line that was cut from this production). But Sullivan’s staging doesn’t actually take us inside the court: the action stays resolutely outside the crude stockade—a place where it’s hard to imagine that a decadent aristocratic life could exist. We get only a wash of the vainglorious court world, with its finery and its vio- lence. (Though there is a terrific fight scene between David Furr’s Orlando, a bumptious, dashing nobleman manqué, and Charles, the Court Wrestler, played by Brendan Averett.) In the absence of a palpable sense of claustrophobia and constraint, of the suffocation that makes transformation urgent, the play loses texture and energy. When the put-upon Ros alind and her companion, Celia (Renee Elise Goldsberry), disguise themselves and escape to the Forest of Ar- den—“Now go we in content / To lib- erty, and not to banishment,” Celia n “As You Like It,” Shakespeare’s cele- As we enter the Delacorte, a raggedy an nounces—we get the idea of liberation bration and sendup of the pastoral, writ- group of rustics are banjo-picking and but not the thrill of it. In Shakespeare’s tenI in 1600, his crew of cast-out characters fiddling bluegrass music (composed by text, Celia says to Rosalind, “Let’s wander into the Forest of Arden, a place the comedian Steve Martin, with addi- away, / And get our jewels and our wealth whose name evoked not only the geogra- tional arrangements by Greg Pliska) in together.” It’s a teasing, tongue-in-cheek phy of Shakespeare’s Edenic Warwickshire front of a large wooden stockade, line, but you won’t hear it in this produc- but also the paradise of his childhood. manned by armed sentries. It’s an inge- tion; Sullivan has cut it. True to form, he (Mary Arden was his mother’s maiden nious transposition, which puts Arden at serves up the fun but not the finesse. name.) The paradox of the pastoral is that the edge of the Western frontier and the To enter the forest is to enter a play the dream of the natural requires artifice. pristine American wilderness—“Earth’s world—an enchanted space, where time is Central Park, where a rollicking produc- only paradise,” as the British poet Mi- absent (“There’s no clock in the forest,” tion of “As You Like It” (directed by Daniel chael Drayton called the New World, in Orlando says) and where the power of Sullivan, at the Delacorte) is being staged, is 1606—an image that resonates as deeply overheated imaginations puts everyone a particularly piquant location for Shake- for an American audience as the thought under a spell. Orlando loves Rosalind; speare’s ironies: a man-made Victorian Ar- of England’s idyllic greenery did for the Rosalind, who has disguised herself as a cadia, where twilight dapples the land- Elizabethans. (The set design is by John young man named Ganymede, loves Or- scaped canopy of maple trees and ducks Lee Beatty.) The fine musicians and lando; the shepherd Silvius (Will Rogers) float on an artificial lake beside the theatre. their infectious sound are deftly woven loves the shepherdess Phoebe (Susannah Flood), who loves Ganymede; the fool, David Furr and Lily Rabe as would-be lovers in Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy. Touchstone (the delightful Oliver Platt), JORGE GONZALEZ 80 THE NEW YORKER, JULY 2, 2012 TNY—2012_07_02—PAGE 80—133SC.—LIVE ART R22339 TERRY (sincere): Inside where? (STOP; loves Audrey (Donna Lynne Champlin), kind of homoerotic hall of mirrors: a man then playfully, fobbing it off.) You’re such a the clog-dancing goatherd. The characters’ playing a woman playing a man playing a little faggot. (Slaps his knee, as if speaking to folly is in their lovesickness, an idealization woman. In Shakespeare’s epilogue— a dog.) C’mere, faggot. of the other that mostly takes the form of which is fudged in this production— poetry. They are compelled to narrate their Rosalind breaks the dramatic frame to ad- At the finale, Brad, bursting into rack- love. Orlando pins his poems for Rosalind dress the pit directly. “If I were a woman ing sobs, finally comes out of the closet to to trees. Phoebe pens a verse for Gany- I would kiss as many of you as had beards Terry in front of everybody. “I . I . I mede and manages to quote the sophisti- that pleas’d me,” she/he said. love you,” he says. The avowal stuns the cated lines of the recently murdered Chris- The Freudian nightmare takes an al- others into a momentary silence that topher Marlowe: “Who ever loved that together more punishing twist in David strikes him as funny, and he starts to laugh loved not at first sight?” Even the self-lov- Adjmi’s smart and well-written new play hysterically. In an amusing and awful dé- ing and melancholy lord Jaques (the excel- “3C” (directed by Jackson Gay, at the nouement, the others all join him in lent Stephen Spinella) puts his suffering on Rattlestick), which refers to the cheap and manic, braying hilarity. a pedestal. Amid this hubbub of romantic cheerful Santa Monica apartment rented CONNIE (trying to be funny): I’m a faggot, delusion, the courtship of Orlando and the by two twenty-somethings, Linda (Han- too! disguised Rosalind—“I would cure you, if nah Cabell) and Connie (Anna Chlum- TERRY: Yeah, me too. LINDA: We’re all faggots! you would but call me Rosalind and come sky), in the coke-snorting, disco-dancing, TERRY: I’M A FAGGOT. every day to my cottage and woo me,” let-it-all-hang-out yesteryear of 1978. CONNIE (excitedly): BOB HOPE’S A Ganymede tells her “love-shaked” object of The dilemma of the men and women FAGGOT! desire—demonstrates the simplest and who collide in Adjmi’s farce about sexual most profound form of love: the longing to identity isn’t that they’ve overshot the run- What plays at first as solidarity—a sort be seen and accepted for what we are. way; it’s that they don’t know where to of sexual Spartacus moment—is actually Lily Rabe seems perfectly cast as land. The isolated Linda, who says, “I’m a spectacular demonstration of the char- Rosalind. Swift, smart, big-hearted, and ugly and I look like a dyke,” hankers for acters’ refusal to think or feel. The psy- playful, she shares with her character a their new tenant, Brad ( Jake Silberman), chological stasis that Adjmi captures natural robustness. She’s easy in herself, and possibly also for Connie. “You’re al- with such skill is the bright doom of an and she has the intellectual and emotional ways on dates. I hardly ever see you any- unexamined life. sinew to juggle Rosalind’s contradictory more,” Linda complains, adding, “Maybe impulses for adventure and surrender. you could help it if you’d stop wearing ou can’t accuse the Broadway musical When Celia tells Rosalind that she has tight shirts and shaking your boobs every- team of John Kander (music) and the seen Orlando in the woods, Rosalind re- where.” Brad has jumped ship after falling lateY Fred Ebb (lyrics) of trading in the plies with an avalanche of questions, con- for his former roommate, the macho Ca- downbeat. “First You Dream,” an anthol- cluding, “Answer me in one word.” Rabe sanova Terry (Eddie Cahill), who teases ogy staging of their best work (conceived makes both Rosalind’s giddiness and her him about being a “faggot” while coming by David Loud and Eric Schaeffer, who clear-eyed wit memorable. “Sell when on to him. Connie, who is as mindless as also directs the sextet of fine-voiced sing- you can, you are not for all markets,” a stone (“Appearances can be deceiving,” ers, at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Rosalind admonishes the balky Phoebe she says. “On the other hand, you can’t Performing Arts, in Washington, D.C.), when she scorns her inamorato. Rabe’s judge a book by its cover”), appears to is a testament to their rousing, rambunc- charisma is helped by her graceful, ath- want anything that moves, in order to fill tious expertise. Although Kander and letic body and her husky voice, but what her colossal emptiness. Ebb can be poignant (“I Miss the Music,” really shines across the footlights is her Without condescending to his lost “Maybe This Time”) and nostalgic (“Only authenticity. At the finale, swept up in souls, who are all accident-prone in their in the Movies”), their theatrical calling the high spirits of the wedding hoedown, own way, Adjmi manages to make a spec- card is showstopping optimism (“New Rabe’s Rosalind kisses Orlando and lets tacle of their self-loathing and the way York, New York,” “Cabaret,” “Ring her lips linger on his as they start to sashay they unwittingly undermine themselves.

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