“What fools these scholars be!”
— “As You Love It,” based on “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
Ouch!
“A hit! A palpable hit!”
— Osric in “Hamlet”
OK. That second quotation can’t be found in Adam Kraar’s riotous world premiere “As You Love It” now at Zeiders American Dream Theater in Virginia Beach. But it could and should have been included in this silly but sage send-up of the Bard’s 1599 play “As You Like It,” plus other works such as “The Tempest.” Kraar might also have worked in “Neither a borrower nor a lender be” (“Hamlet”), but that might have seemed hypocritical for such an overtly derivative play. Besides, it sounds like something our beleaguered chair of the Federal Reserve might say.
The truth is, as every good scholar knows, Shakespeare himself was a prodigious borrower of other writers’ treasures. “As You Like It” was lifted in part from Thomas Lodge’s 1590 “Rosalynde; or, Euphues’ Golden Legacy,” which had itself been borrowed from a 14th century poem called “The Tale of Gamelyn” (Riverside edition of Shakespeare). Thank goodness, as well, that copyright law didn’t come along until later; we’d have no Shakespeare at all to either “like” or “love.”
Here’s the premise of Kraar’s new show, first workshopped at Virginia Wesleyan University and then directed with feckless, funny fluidity by Maryanne Kiley.
First, move Shakespeare’s original “As You Like It” ahead in time to the early 20th century and make its setting “A New York City of the Mind.” That’s bold and hazy enough. The Z theater’s shape — nearly in the round — facilitates such mind games. Set designer Kate Pinner creates a skyline upstage that could be either suburban London or Venice or some Venice-like town on Long Island, New York. The highlight of the set is a bust of Shakespeare crafted by props manager Lori Dunn that shows the Bard with a benign sort of quizzical smirk. He’s not too sure what’s going on here.
We’re in the rapidly deteriorating boarding house of the Langtree family. Mother Langtree is Eloise (Equity actor Alana Dodds Sharp, whose timing is just that: very sharp, and whose fake Georgia accent is supposed to mock Tennessee Williams, too, one suspects). Father Langtree is Claypool (the other Equity pro, Jody O’Neil). They have two daughters, the acerbic Cleopatra (adroitly done by Janae Thompson) and our heroine Lydia (endearingly done by Margo von Buseck). Both daughters are of marriageable age, and Cleo has an offer of marriage by a New York Irish cop named Laddy (played, along with many other roles, by the also adroit Dan Cimo). Laddy’s father wants a dowry, however, which has put any nuptials on pause.
The Langtrees, you see, are strapped for cash, with the boarding house falling down around their ears. Claypool the Father is an antiquarian bookseller, who begins the show hopeful about an impending merger of his store with that of Bartholomew Callow (gently played with perpetual astonishment by Greg Dragas). The merger involves Callow’s proposed marriage to our star Lydia, however, and Lydia just doesn’t swing that way. We soon realize she’s in love with one of the Langtrees’ theatrical boarders, Claire (Norfolk State-trained Indya Jackson, the evening’s luminous beating heart). We have another eccentric rent-in-arrears boarder named Lachlan Must (a speaking name) played by local stage stalwart Ron Newman (along with other more frantic, less musty parts, including a Broadway producer). Finally, we have Anna Sosa playing another actor, Clorinda Joy Walker, and doing outrageous lisping accents.
The three (count ’em, three) experts on all things Shakespearean and antique — Claypool Langtree (O’Neil), Lachlan Must (Newman) and an Oxfordian professor Cyrus Spurlock (Cimo) — are all buffaloed into thinking a play titled “As You Love It,” being slowly written just offstage by young Lydia, is an authentic lost work by the Bard himself, a sequel to “As You Like It” concerning Rosalind and Orlando’s child named Angelique (Jackson). Characters from that work-in-progress scamper on and off stage delivering snippets of the fake Shakespearean work, sometimes, quite impressively written in blank verse or even rhymed couplets. Pirates and shipwrecks (remember I mentioned “The Tempest”?) happen in the “Bermoothes” (Shakespearean for Bermuda).
It’s all quite confusing. A full list of the doubled and tripled and quadrupled roles and a corresponding list of the real and fake Shakespearean characters would certainly help the hapless audience members and critics trying to keep track of it all. What our playwright has intentionally and cleverly created, however, is a hall of mirrors, a highly self-reflexive work that is more like a carnival fun house than an evening at the Globe or Blackfriars.
But there’s still something for everyone. English teachers might catch the lightning-fast joke about Andronicus pies (“Titus Andronicus” was Shakespeare’s play involving cannibalism). What most people know best about “As You Like It” — Jaques’ “Seven Ages of Man” speech, which begins “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players” — seems inexplicably omitted by playwright Kraar. Perhaps it’s just too familiar. But he makes riotous use of lesser-known repeated lists of the changing pairs of “eternal” lovers (ending in the original with Rosalind’s “and I for no woman” and in the send-up, Claire’s “and I for no man” ). The original “As You Like It” has an unusual female epilogue; Kraar gives his riff of a play a female prologue. It’s a bit like a player stealing the ball in a fast-paced basketball game and then slam-dunking it. As Claire says to her finally outed love Lydia: “Your work will remind the world why there’s nothing better than watching a good play.”
Kraar’s play may be a bit frantic and confusing (director Kiley accentuates that manic approach), but it’s funny and, like its progenitor play, sometimes profound.
And that bust of Shakespeare center stage just looks on with quizzical good humor. The Bard can take it.
All the world’s a stage, after all.
Page Laws is dean emerita of the Nusbaum Honors College at Norfolk State University. prlaws@aya.yale.edu
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If you go
When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday and Friday, 3 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday through May 24
Where: Zeiders American Dream Theater, 4509 Commerce St., Virginia Beach
Tickets: $15-$30, $35 Pride Night (May 22)
Details: thez.org