Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” was performed in the Shapiro Campus Center Theater this past weekend, put on by Brandeis’s Shakespeare and classical theatre company Hold Thy Peace. It was set in modern Boston and western Massachusetts rather than in medieval France. The production gave a comedic, if somewhat confusing performance.

In a nutshell, the play features several characters running around the forest, having bizarre interactions and falling in love with each other. The show follows Rosalind (Tova Weinberger ’18), whose father, the Duke (Remony Perlman ’19), has just been overthrown by his younger brother and banished from the city — or in this case  kicked out of the family law firm and banished. Rosalind meets Orlando (Bryan McNamara ’19) and the two fall in love at first sight.

 Soon after, Rosalind is also banished by her uncle. Her cousin Celia (Jessica Spierer ’18) is like a sister to her, and in an act of true friendship runs away with her. Rosalind dresses up as a boy and goes by the name of Ganymede. Orlando soon also has to leave the city after a fight with his older brother, who has inherited his father’s wealth and titles. All of the characters end up running around in the forest for most of the play, or in this case, Western Massachusetts, and ultimately get married.

In an interview with the Justice, director Barbara Spidle ’16 said that her reason for choosing to direct “As You Like It” was more than anything because of her admiration for the play’s heroine, Rosalind. Spidle said she loved “Rosalind’s journey of self discovery, finding love but also finding self-love.” Rosalind, despite falling in love with Orlando, doesn’t agree to marry him right away but tests him over and over again throughout the play to make sure that his love is real. 

Spidle said she chose Boston as the setting of the play because, firstly, as a Waltham native, Boston is the place she knows best. She added that “the show deals with a lot of feminist issues, and that’s true even here in modern-day Boston, despite Massachusetts’s proclaimed liberalism.” She also hoped that setting it in Boston would help make it accessible to modern audiences. 

Despite Spidle’s intentions, though, there weren’t any real indications in the set that the play took place in Boston. The only really big clue was that some of the characters wore sweatshirts with the names of local colleges on them, with the lead, Rosalind, wearing a Brandeis sweatshirt. 

Scenes in the forest, indicated by Birch trees, featured many people smoking pot, which was meant to be indicative of Western Massachusetts being a sort of backwoods. However, if I hadn’t spoken to Spidle or read the director’s note, I would never have known that the setting was supposed to be Boston. 

Weinberger gave a fair performance as Rosalind, but the production’s real star was Connor Wahrman ’17 who played Jaques, a fool. We meet Wahrman in a melancholy state, asking for a song from Amiens (Alex Peters ’18), who had a beautiful voice. Wahrman eventually joined in with him. Wahrman dominated the whole stage and elicited laughs from the audience with his incredible physicality, including one particular moment when he bent backwards over a bench. He alternated between being melancholy and euphoric but remained always quite absurd. Jaques is also the character that gives the famous “All the world’s a stage” soliloquy, which Wahrman delivered admirably. 

One problem with the play was that it was often difficult to comprehend what the characters were saying and follow what was happening. Some may say that that is to be expected with Shakespeare, but the truth is that if a production is really done well, the audience should understand anyway despite the Elizabethan language, and this production didn’t always accomplish that. 

Many of the monologues were given without pauses or expression to try to indicate what was being said. This happened a fair amount with Missy Kintish ’17, who played Corin. Kintish’s monlogues were given as if high on weed, which was amusing, but were just run off without pauses or emphasis. 

It didn’t help that as a play, “As You Like It” has very little plot, and several minor characters that don’t naturally fit in to the play but just seem to appear and be around. One actor who did accomplish being able to convey what he was saying to the audience in a clear and understandable way was Riley Allen ’18, who played Touchstone. 

Allen took pauses and added emphasis where he needed to, and even used a lot of hand gestures to make the meaning of his words clear. The production seemed to rely heavily on breaking script and inserting modern English phrases into the dialogue to get across to the audience the gist of what was happening, although this method did elicit a lot of laughs. 

“As You Like It” was comedic and touched on a lot of feminist issues, but it often came up short in trying to make the language understandable and clear. It was a lukewarm production.