Tree Defacement and Other Shenanigans: A Light-Hearted As You Like It

Georgia Shakespeare sometimes does Shakespeare in the Park, in which they show up at a park in Atlanta, sell tickets for low low prices (such as free if you purchase online on the correct day) and perform plays for the masses to the locally gathered masses.

I realize The Globe was much more of a structured structure than park grass, but I like to think this is the scene Shakespeare was writing for anyway.  A group of people chilling with their picnics, giggling at the slapstick comedy.  In this case, As you Like It, in this production, due to the great musical talent of the cast in performing the written in songs, turned into kind of a stupid musical rather than just kind of a stupid play.

This is not a criticism.  As you Like It is largely crowd-pleasing fluff as written, and it was here played as fluff, complete with silly wrestling match in which people fall down humourously.   (It is a constant, universal across time and culture, that humour is when people fall down.  Because humans are rather terrible creatures.  To our credit, however, we generally stop thinking it's funny if someone gets hurt.)  Add some gratuitous mocking of (really bad) love poems and the zeal of the lovelorn poet, shepherds and goatherds with very redneck accents to code them as Rustic and Ignorant folk, and some gender-bending hijinks named Ganymede (and I now understand the homoerotic allusion in that name), and it's a very funny time accompanied by a guitar-bearing page.  Who strummed and frolicked at the same time, I was impressed.

Sure, there is a slightly more serious speech in the play ("All the world's a stage...") but this time around, I was distracted by wondering if the melancholy and irony of Jacques was a prototype for Wilde-style aesthetic melancholy.  It's quite possible, of course, that Shakespeare is laughing at us with some deep passage hidden behind the sex jokes, but meh, he wrote for the masses to laugh.  I'll be a laughing mass.

The evening was lovely.  I am in civilization, it is warm enough in summer to spend an evening outside without discomfort, and my neighbors on the lawn had too much pizza and cake.  Just too much pizza and cake.  I was asked to help them eat it.  'Twas a hardship, but we must all do our part to alleviate the terrible burden of too much food.

I'm so happy I live in Atlanta again.