As You Like It from page to stage

Ask Great Lakes Theater’s producing director Charles Fee about As You Like It, and his enthusiasm pours forth. “It’s difficult not to love As You Like It,” raves Fee. “It’s an absolute masterpiece.”

Central to the play’s mastery, in Fee’s view, is the character of Rosalind. “Without any doubt, she is one of the greatest roles ever written. She sees through pretense, posing, male vanity — just as all of Shakespeare’s best women do,” he says. “Rosalind sees though the cliches of love and dismantles them even as she embraces love. Her mission is to teach Orlando how to be in love, and she’s going to teach all of us.”

Part of Rosalind’s appeal for contemporary American audiences is the way she speaks. Shakespeare’s source material for the play was written in prose, not poetry, and the playwright retained prose for the majority of Rosalind’s lines. “She’s so direct and so clear,” observes Fee. “She speaks just like we do.”

One of the joys of presiding over a resident company of actors is matching roles to people.

Veteran company member Jodi Dominick plays Rosalind in this production. It’s a role that both she and Fee have long wanted her to tackle.

The world of the play is also a major part of its appeal for Fee. The rigid and male-dominate court contrasts so strikingly with the freeing forest. “The forest is healing,” remarks Fee. “Everyone feels it. It can’t be dispelled by the persistent melancholy of Jacques. Even the usurping duke experiences a conversion in the forest. All of Shakespeare’s comedies end in marriage, but this one ends in five!”

As You Like It has been called the happiest of Shakespeare’s plays. Fee charged his designers with conveying the happy, healing nature of the