“‘Far Out, Man’: As You Like It and the Summer of Love”
Hello, everyone and welcome to the Heart
of America Shakespeare Festival’s 21st season production of As
You Like It. If you are a regular attendee of the Show Talk at the
festival, you have not seen me before! More than likely you were expecting to
see either the very entertaining Philip blue owl Hooser, who normally would be
giving the Show Talk during the first two weeks of the festival, or the
unparalleled Felicia Londre, who will be giving the Show Talk for the second
half of the festival, beginning on Saturday evening and running through to the
closing night performance on July the 7th. However, starting
tonight, Phil’s talents were needed elsewhere, since he is performing in Death
in the Dustbowl, a production with the Murder Mystery Train Dinner Theatre.
So, who am I? My name is Thomas Canfield,
and I am an instructor of Theatre, Humanities, and English at UMKC and National
American University. I earned my Ph.D. in English, with a focus on Elizabethan
drama, from the University of Louisiana in 1998. Right now, I am attending UMKC
while finishing a second master’s degree in Theatre History. I also have been
the Dramaturg for the last seven summer productions at the Shakespeare
Festival, including this year’s production.
The next question most people ask is: “What is a dramaturg?” Well, with
different theatres and different types of theatrical productions, a dramaturg’s
duties and responsibilities may vary. He or she is essentially a literary consultant
or advisor. A dramaturg may do textual work with a script; he or she may
research the world of a play to assist the director, designers, and the actors
in finding pathways into it and making artistic choices; a dramaturg might even
research, compile, and write program materials for the audience members who
attend the production.
With the Shakespeare festival, I typically
attend some rehearsals and run-throughs, and follow along in my copy of the
script that Sidonie Garrett, the Executive Artistic Director, cuts and prepares
before our first day of rehearsal. If anyone on the production team wants me to
do any specific research, or any member of the cast has questions about their
role that require some kind of research, I will go off to the library, see what
I can find, compile it into a dramaturgical note, and then bring an answer back
to them the next day. While in rehearsals, as a literary person, I pay
attention to the iambic pentameter of the lines while we are running through
them and I also try to listen for the proper pronunciation of words. I always
have a dictionary, a Shakespeare lexicon, and a pronunciation guide for the
names in Shakespeare’s plays with me. Of
course, a lot of directors, designers, and actors are not accustomed to always having
access to a dramaturg, so they do have experience doing their own research–but they may not have the
time to do so when a question arises in the middle of a busy rehearsal
schedule. And sometimes the questions I am asked simply do not have an answer,
and the company member who asks me just wants confirmation of that fact.
At other times, I might be asked to
research an obscure question or topic. For Romeo and Juliet, I spent two
days researching 14th century Italian Catholic funeral rituals,
which never did eventually get used in the final production. For Othello,
I researched the “blood brothers” ritual that we used in one scene between
Othello and Iago. Historical plays often need more in-depth research than
others. For Richard III, I was asked to research Richard’s line about
“French nods” to see what Shakespeare might have meant. And sometimes, my
answers are just best guesses and not definitive. Last year, for Antony and
Cleopatra, I spent several days researching the ankh, which is sort of like
an Egyptian cross with a loop at the top: what it meant as a symbol to the
ancient Egyptians and how it should be held, which I was able to determine by
looking at hundreds of images of ankhs in Egyptian artwork. But perhaps the
most visible contribution that many dramaturgs make as far as audience members
are concerned is in the form of a program essay. I do write a program essay for
the Shakespeare Festival every year, although sometimes, because of page
limitations and the need for advertising space, it doesn’t always make it in.
This year, however, it is–even though I did have to cut it down somewhat for length
from the original version that I wrote.
If you’ve already been over to the other
side of the park and seen the stage for As You Like It this summer, you
know that this year’s production is somewhat unique for us in that, instead of
locating the world of the play in a traditional setting, we have taken it and
made it “groovy” by transferring the action to 1967. Instead of seeing our
performers costumed in brocade doublets, hose and codpieces, you should be
prepared for a psychedelically-visual treat—or nightmare—depending upon your
opinion about fashion and style in the late 1960s. We have Dayglo colors,
shirts with wide collars, paisley vests, bell-bottomed blue jeans, gypsy
skirts, bandanas, silver turquoise belt buckles, love beads, and even some
go-go boots–with
period go-go dancing to go along with them.
So, why
did we do this, and what is the rationale behind transferring As You Like It
to 1967? Well, we haven’t lost our minds completely this summer. In fact, ours
is not the first “hippie” production of the play, although ours is certainly
unique in its own right. Several productions have, in fact, conceived of and
set the play in the “swinging sixties,” going back at least to a 1997
production of As You Like It at the Public Theatre in Brighton,
Massachusetts. Historically, the summer of 1967 is also known as “Summer of Love,”
and while the major theme of all of Shakespeare’s comedies is love, As You
Like It explores various types of love relationships to a greater extent
than any other.
In the summer of
1967, as many as 100,000 people converged on the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of
San Francisco, initiating a major cultural and political shift that would come
to be known as the Hippie Revolution. As the epicenter of this revolution, San
Francisco became an experimental melting pot for politics, psychedelic
music, psychoactive drugs, creativity, uninhibited sexuality, and social liberation.
In contrast, many of the conservative people in society–those people whom many
hippies would have referred to as “squares” because of their inside-the-box
thinking–viewed this revolution from the outside and were led to question their
lifestyles and the choices they had made. As You Like It opens at the
court of Duke Frederick, a conniving and suspicious ruler, and Shakespeare
portrays his court is a very repressive and confining place marked with dark
plots and behind-the scenes intrigue. No one at the court can be trusted, and
no one is truly free to pursue his or her own personal happiness. Just as many
of the young people who came of age in the late 1960s were suspicious of the
government and anyone who was an authority figure, in our play, the more enlightened
and socially-conscious citizens who live under Duke Frederick’s rule are not
happy with the way things are.
Duke Frederick has
stolen the throne from Duke Senior, his elder brother, and driven him into
exile in the Forest of Arden. In 1960s lingo, Duke Frederick is “the man;” he
lives in an isolated, selfish world of his own, out of touch with the rest of
society, and his court would represent “the establishment,” where black suits
with narrow ties are the height of fashion, and three-martini lunches and
cocktail hours are commonplace. The order of the day at court is maintaining
the status quo and obedience to the rules, however artificial, arbitrary and
meaningless those rules may be. In the opening scene of our production, we even
witness some 1960s-style protesting, complete with signs and chanting, against
the duke’s iron-fisted grip on his power.
In the forest,
however, for the exiled Duke Senior and his followers, banishment turns out to
be a liberating experience. Transplanted to an idyllic woodland environment,
free from arbitrary rules and laws and surrounded by Mother Nature’s bounty,
they enjoy a life without any real demands or hardships. It essentially is a
commune. When the Summer of Love came to an end, thousands of hippies joined the
back-to-nature movement, heading “back to the land” and founding what is
estimated to have been ten thousand alternative, egalitarian farms all across
the United States. Renouncing the labels of society and rejecting consumerism,
they sought to create a liberated existence in harmony with nature.
Shakespeare’s play is classified as a pastoral comedy, and the courtiers, like
many hippies who participated in the back to the land movement, found a
counter-urban Utopian society. Away from the rigid schedules and demands of the
rat race at court, the Forest of Arden is a place where they have the leisure
time to discover, as Duke Senior terms it, “tongues in trees, books in the
running brooks, / Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.”
Back at court, when Duke
Frederick, suddenly and without explanation, banishes Rosalind, the daughter of
Duke Senior, she and her cousin Celia, his daughter, also flee to the woods.
Disguising themselves as brother and sister and adopting the names of Ganymede
and Aliena, the two young women, accompanied by the court clown Touchstone,
also get back to nature. They establish residence in a cottage on the edge of
the forest and purchase a flock of sheep, which are tended to by the rustic
shepherds Corin and Silvius. Corin, the elderly shepherd, extols the natural,
honest virtues of a country life by stating, “I am a true labourer. I earn that
I eat, get that I wear; owe no man hate, envy no man’s happiness; glad of other
men’s good, content with my harm; and the greatest of my pride is to see my
ewes graze and my lambs suck.”
The play also
features another set of brothers who are at odds with each other, the
mean-spirited Oliver and his younger brother Orlando. When Orlando learns of a
plot by his older brother to murder him, he also takes refuge in the
countryside, but only after he has fallen hopelessly in love with Rosalind. And
eventually, Oliver follows him. Once our production goes into the forest, we
never again return to the confines of the court, and this physical journey that
the courtly characters make into the natural environment becomes a
transformational experience for all of them in one way or another.
The “back to nature”
movement of the 1960s also contained an environmentalist strain and many of its
members were concerned about the ecological damage and future of the
world. Rachel Carson’s influential book
titled Silent Spring, about the detrimental effects of pesticides on the
environment, was published in 1962 and is widely credited with helping launch
the modern American environmental movement. Counterculture environmentalists of
the 1960s were concerned about overpopulation, pollution, litter, and the
limited availability of natural resources. And, in at least two instances, As
You Like It, also expresses concerns about how the humans interlopers
negatively impact the pristine, natural world of the forest when they enter it.
Jacques, the melancholy follower of Duke Senior, laments the killing of the
deer in the forest by the Duke’s men, calling the hunters “mere usurpers,” and
“tyrants,” because they “fright the animals” and “kill them up / In their
assigned and native dwelling-place.” When Orlando arrives in the forest, the
love-smitten young man carves Rosalind’s name into the bark of the trees and
hangs poorly-penned verses of love from their branches. Expressing the depth of
his emotion, Orlando says, “O Rosalind, these trees shall be my books, / And in
their barks my thoughts I’ll character, / That every eye which in this forest
looks / Shall see thy virtue witnessed everywhere. / Run, run, Orlando, carve
on every tree / The fair, the chaste and unexpressive she!” Again, it is the
character of Jacques who expresses concern for the environment, which is
probably just as much motivated by his distaste for Orlando’s amateur verses.
He says, “I pray you sir, mar no more trees with writing love-songs in their
barks.”
For the flower
children of the Summer of Love who engaged in this huge social experiment, the
ideals of peace and love were antidotes to what they perceived to be the social
and political ills of the time. In contrast to the social and political turmoil
that plagues the court, Shakespeare portrays the forest as a relatively
peaceful place. During their stay in the woods, the characters have an opportunity
to debate the relative merits of several subjects that interest them, including
court and country, youth and old age, inner virtue and the gifts of fortune,
reality and romance, the active and contemplative life, and laughter and
melancholy. Although suffering, violence, and danger do exist in the woods in
the form of hunger, unpredictable weather, and wild animals, no one dies in the
play and there is only minimal, offstage bloodshed.
But what about the
“love” aspect of peace and love? In the 1960s, by rejecting what they viewed as
traditional, one-sided morals and values, the hippies made alternative
lifestyles, such as “free love,” more accepted. While the romantically-involved
characters in Shakespeare’s play actually do marry at its conclusion, so there
is technically no “free love” involved, the unions that are formed before the
end take on many different guises. Touchstone, for example, woos and marries
Audrey, a simple country wench, with the objective of satisfying his immediate
lustful desire; the two characters have absolutely nothing in common, and even
before they wed, he indicates that he may quickly abandon her. Certainly if the
concept of “free love” were around and accepted at the time, Touchstone would
have taken advantage of it. Other unions seem more grounded in promise, but as
the title suggests, As You Like It is intended to suit a variety of
romantic tastes and demonstrates a spectrum of different relationships. In some
ways, it resembles like a Shakespearean version of The Dating Game, the
popular television show that first aired in 1965. In affording his characters
the liberty to seek out their own happiness and to obtain what they truly
desire, Shakespeare also allows individual audience members to choose from a
variety of attitudes and preferences about love relationships, whether
romantic, optimistic, or cynical.
The modern movement
toward gender equality–women’s lib as it was called then, and feminism
today–also had roots in the 1960s. As a character, it could be argued that Rosalind
is Shakespeare’s most liberated female character. She certainly is his most
prominent heroine, speaking more lines in this play than any other female
character in all of his works. Cross-dressing as a man when she enters the
forest liberates Rosalind from traditional female roles and stereotypes. This
is something that Shakespeare does in other plays as well, but in As You
Like It, Rosalind goes further than that. She becomes a truly
sexually-ambivalent character when, disguised as the young man Ganymede,
Rosalind convinces Orlando to submit to a type of therapy for his lovelorn
state. This cure involves Orlando pretending that Ganymede is Rosalind; Orlando
must visit the “young man” periodically and woo the
youth. Imagine that you were in Shakespeare’s original audience: a male actor
would have been playing the role of a female character who masquerades as a
male, but who then pretends to be a female. Because Rosalind is the play’s
driving figure, traditionally her role has been considered as the lead
throughout history. In contrast, many leading male actors have chosen to play
the role of Touchstone or Jacques rather than Orlando who, as a character, is
really sort of overshadowed by her strength as a character and her manipulation
of him. In other words, she truly wears the pants in their relationship!
Of course, another
remarkable aspect of the sixties was the revolution in music that took place,
and because As You Like It contains so many songs, the play offered our
composer, Greg Mackender, many opportunities to set the words of Shakespeare’s
songs to music that was evocative of the period. The work that Greg does is
always impressive, but because I haven’t heard him do anything quite like this
before, I was really amazed. Of course, he uses instruments that evoke the
period, such as electric guitars and sitars, but the most remarkable aspect
about the music is how well Shakespeare’s lyrics can be transformed into folk
music that sounds like it was written 50 years ago, rather than 400 years ago. And
I am sure that you will agree. It is far out, man!
Because the festival
is a family-oriented event and we want everyone to come, we made the artistic
choice to omit some of the other less legal activities that were common in the
hippie counterculture of the 1960s in our interpretation of the play, even
though I am sure it might have gotten a few gratuitous laughs. In fact, in some
of those other productions that I was talking about, directors have made the
choice to have the performers, for example, pretending that they are smoking
marijuana on the stage, although we did not.
In the end of the
play, Shakespeare ties up all the loose ends and everything falls into place.
All of the characters in As You Like It who get back to nature are
transformed by their experience, and most of them for the better, perhaps
showing the real meaning of the term “flower power.” When they enter the
forest, Duke Frederick and Oliver, the two “stuffed shirts” who sought the
destruction of their respective brothers, resolve to abandon their former plans
and live out the rest of their future lives quite differently. After Orlando
saves his life, Oliver and his younger brother are reconciled, and then Oliver
then falls in love with Celia and they marry. Oliver plans to bequeath the
family estate to his younger brother and spend the remainder of his life as a
humble shepherd. Likewise, Duke Frederick also abandons his own tyranny after
setting out to capture his elder brother in the forest. He has an abrupt
religious conversion and decides to live out a life of solitary contemplation
far away from the seat of power; he also restores Duke Senior to his rightful
throne. In many ways, perhaps a conclusion such as this also echoes the
optimism of the 1960s, as reflected in things as the space program and the
feeling that anything could be accomplished through social agitation and
protest.
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