Monday, February 1, 2010




Promotional artwork by Anthony Tremmaglia

Director Charles McFarland and friends at Third Wall Theatre were wrestling with a challenge: how to pin down Shakespeare’s As You Like It as a contemporary love story with an attention-grabbing twist.

The answer: professional wrestling, of course, used as a metaphor for the violent and political society from which the characters flee in the second part of the play.

But the casting of former pro wrestler Glen Kulka is only one of the head-turning modern elements in store when As You Like It opens at the GCTC’s Irving Greenberg Theatre on Thursday, February 4. There are also original contemporary melodies by David Dacosta (imbued with Shakespearian lyrics), slick, contemporary set design by Sarah Waghorn and Rebecca Miller, and other surprises.

The seedlings of the innovative production were planted last year, when Third Wall’s commitment to updated takes on the classics gave rise to the company’s Shakespeare Ensemble, a group of 25 local actors immersed in the ways of The Bard with a different approach to interpreting the material.

“Very quickly we found that these actors coalesced around the challenge of verse-speaking,” explained McFarland. “When we took the work out to audiences we found that this way produces edge-of-your-seat experiences for them as they hear the play clearly and immediately—getting rid of all the cobwebs we usually associate with heavy, classical theatre.”

The Ensemble's debut production in 2009 was what McFarland called a “rock 'n' roll Henry V,” complete with spinning scaffolding and video-montages of Afghan and Iraq conflicts. “All to drive home the contemporary application of the play's questions about who sends countries in to war,” said McFarland.

To lighten things up this year, Third Wall chose As You Like It, arguably the greatest of Shakespeare's plays about love, and timed the production to coincide with Valentine's Day.

Is McFarland at all worried about what Shakespearian purists might think? Not at all.

“Choosing to do any Shakespeare in what you might call historical costume is a retrospective choice that goes against how Shakespeare wrote and produced the plays,” said McFarland, “which were always done in contemporary dress with maybe a few historical 'bits' thrown on top if needed.”

McFarland feels Shakespeare is so frequently interpreted from a modern viewpoint because of the “universality” of his stories.

“And we're catching up, or getting back, to the immediacy of the plays when they were first performed,” McFarland explains. “In fact, there are centuries of period costume or historical interpretations between Shakespeare's time and our own that get in the way of the audience experiencing the plays in the way his first audiences did.”

“This is really all about championing Shakespeare as a modern writer—universal themes of love or war—or maybe the wars of love—given a modern feel, just as he did in 1599.”

The cast of As You Like It includes Kristina Watt as Rosalind, Jordan Hancey as Orlando, Michael Mancini as Touchstone, Scott Wilson as Jacques, Mishka Lavigne as Phoebe, and Tania Levy as Audrey.

See the play on Guerilla night

Thursday, February 11 is Guerilla Night during the As You Like It run at GCTC. To take advantage of a special $15 ticket price (plus convenience fee) available to friends of Guerilla magazine, send an email expressing your interest to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .