310 Blog Post: As You Like It

            Theater is a space of transgression. I sometimes wonder if that’s why I’ve gravitated to theater since I was young. Queer, ex-catholic, foul-mouthed, somewhat-disappointing-offspring that I am, theater provided me a space in which to see the rules bent, in which those of us who bend them are celebrated for it, quite literally applauded for doing things we’d often be shunned for. The audience doesn’t generally walk out at the end of a show muttering in disapproval. I’ve seen an audience of conservative Tucsonan grandparents give a standing ovation to drag queens in Kinky Boots and queer Berlin nightclub goers in Cabaret. These are the same people who stare at me when I dress just a little too not-straight, or who tut disapprovingly when I am too loud, too large, too unladylike in public. They don’t like me, but in the theater they can be forced—often without realizing they are doing so—to look at people like me and see who we are, and why we matter.

            That unabashed celebration of the Not Normal is what delighted me so much about the shows we saw this week. Both the production of Flesh and Bone and As You Like It refused to adhere to convention, to social nicety, to the rigorous framework in which audiences often expect theater to exist. They transgress, but in a way that feels right and just and profoundly necessary. They turn convention on its head to show just how stifling it is.

            The Globe’s production of As You Like It worked hard to question notions of sex and gender, and in ways that perhaps turn Shakespeare’s actual text on its head as much as anything else. Certainly, the original involves a good deal of crossdressing and inversion of gender roles, but in most productions those loops are closed neatly. The end of the play is a reassertion of order, and the understanding is that the characters will leave the Forest of Arden and never again revisit the fantastical and unbounded world they found there. In this production, though, the end of the play is not a reassertion of order, but the assertion of a new order. By reordering the wedding scene so that Rosalind and Hymen are seen as in collusion, it firmly places the greatest agency of the play back into the hands of a gender nonconforming woman, one with fiery opinions and a plan. She is no longer interrupted by a goddess and put back into her place as a mere mortal. She is, instead, the mastermind of the whole affair. Rosalind wins this production, outwitting everyone else onstage and getting exactly the happy ending she wants.

            More than alterations to the text, though, this production made its point through casting and costume. Orlando in this play is not played by a brawny youth, but a tiny woman in ill-fitting suits, and yet his might and ferocity is undeniable. Rosalind is not played by a beautiful woman, but by a tall, gaunt young man, and yet she carries herself with grace and an undeniable femininity. This casting highlights something that modern audiences often miss about the original play: its queerness. Shakespeare’s audiences watched a blatantly queer romance unfold before them, and so do we, but with one very important difference. In the seventeenth century, all is restored. Rosalind is once again a properly dressed lady, and though she was played by a boy, the audience was given to understand that she had stepped firmly back into the role of womanhood, with all its meekness and subservience, allowing Orlando to save his heterosexual masculinity. In this week’s performance, though, that does not happen. As the play goes on, not only does Orlando fall just as much in love with Ganymede as Rosalind, his costume also begins to fit him better. In effect, the queerer his story is, the more comfortable and right he appears onstage. Rosalind, too, is costumed to highlight her queerness. When she is costumed as a boy, she begins in a fairly standard set of male garb, with floral details on the sleeves to remind us of her original gender, but at intermission, as all the characters become more comfortable in their roles in the forest—importantly, far away from the formally dressed and socially regimented court scenes—she switches to a decidedly more effeminate getup, complete with rose and swan-embroidered bomber jacket. Then, when she reveals herself as a woman once more, she does not return to skirts and long hair. Her hair remains cropped and she wears a pair of flowered pants with a corset. In effect, Rosalind’s persona of Ganymede does not quite present as male, but nor does she present herself as quite female by the end. There is no restoration to heteronormativity, no un-queering of the play, and the characters seem quite happy with that. It creates the sense that the way forward for the community is not through brief periods of upending the social order, but through a genuine and lasting deconstruction of it.

            Four hundred years ago, the South Bank was a place full of the parts of life London didn’t want within its boundaries. Prostitutes, blood sports, and actors all set up their home across the river from civilization. They transgressed, and they still transgress, but just as they did then, people still come to partake of what they offer. If going beyond the bounds of society is sin, then it is a sin that society itself seems to crave. So then, perhaps it is the bounds themselves that are in the wrong.