The sun set gently below the horizon, through the trees behind English House, on the edge of Bryn Mawr campus. As if a choreographed piece of the Shakespeare Performance Troupe’s interpretation of “As You Like It,” the sunset marked the time for intermission.
The Shakespeare Performance Troupe (or SPT) set “As You Like It” outdoors during the weekend of April 17, while their concurrently running performance of “Antigone” took place in Rhoads Dining Hall. As it turned out, the performance’s setting in the woodsy area behind English House fit perfectly into SPT’s vision for “As You Like It.” As the characters get lost in the mysterious Forest of Arden, the actors change locations, with the audience following along, promenade-style, to watch new scenes unfold in new settings.
Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” tells the story of two feuds between two pairs of brothers. Orlando (Willa Romer-Mack) is exiled to the Forest of Arden by his brother Oliver– redefined as an older sister Olivia (Sarah Nitsche) in the SPT show. Simultaneously, a young woman named Rosalind (Sophie Alegria Elizabeth Madle) is exiled by an uncle who despises her father and wanders the forest with her cousin Celia (Gabriela Marie Pabon). While disguised as a youth named Ganymede, Rosalind encounters Orlando in the woods and the two fall in love.
“As You Like It” was directed by biology major Madeline Nobert (BMC ‘26). Traditionally, she has been on the technical side of many theater productions. Nobert identifies as a theater technician of eight years, a passion which was fed at her performing arts high school.
The technical elements of “As You Like It,” such as costuming and props, all centered around a very dainty, magical, and floral style. The intricately painted deer puppet was a clear highlight. For the most part, though, the natural landscape of Bryn Mawr campus filled in on the technical front. As Nobert tells it, SPT found it freeing to be able to depend on the beautiful trees and fields to cue the audience into the magical qualities of the play.
Sitting in the grass during the performance, on one of the first warm days of spring, it was easy to feel immersed in a strange world being played out within arms reach. The production also used solar-powered lights to make sure that viewers could clearly see performer’s faces after the sun went down. These lights incidentally contributed to the drama and intensity of the latter end of the show.
Nobert directed “As You Like It” while working on a biology thesis. She remembers the first day when it was warm enough to rehearse the show outside, recalling that that was the moment that each actor’s characterization finally came together.
As a theater troupe at a historically women’s college, SPT prefers to lean into the odd moments of gender confusion within Shakespeare plays. As Nobert pointed out, a lot of the comedy originally derived from plays like “As You Like It” came from the fact that Elizabethan theater was only open to men, resulting in moments where boys were dressed as women who were in turn dressed as young men.
Given the different gender identities of their actors, SPT gets creative when applying these themes of gender to their interpretations of Shakespeare plays. When adapting “As You Like It,” Nobert and SPT changed the gender of two characters. Oliver became Olivia and a shepherd became a shepherdess.
By changing the character of Oliver to be a woman named Olivia, Nobert attempted to recontextualize the feud between Oliver and Orlando in connection with the practice of primogeniture, in which property was inherited by eldest sons and traditionally withheld from daughters.
This was an intriguing adaptation, a choice that proposes to both reckon with the unspoken legal context of the original text and time period, while commenting on an inequality from a modern perspective. However, this shift introduced more complications. In this gender-bent iteration, Orlando’s hatred for his withholding elder brother goes from unexplained (admittedly awkwardly so) to misogynistic.
Olivia’s grudge against Orlando remains to be justified– we are left to assume she hates him for inheriting what ought to be hers, but Shakespeare’s play leaves little room for sympathy toward Olivia’s spiteful bids for retribution. Suffice to say, gender politics remain complicated and fraught, even for a director who thoughtfully seeks to subvert Shakespeare’s original text and play with gender in a unique and relevant way.
Besides the switch from Oliver to Olivia, the text of “As You Like It” provided many more opportunities for the actors to experiment with gender. Nobert described it as a show about different forms of femininity. She writes in her director’s statement: “Bryn Mawr is a place to explore one’s gender identity and push boundaries, and for that reason lends itself well to the journeys that the characters go on in the play.”
Nobert explained that when Rosalind is with her cousin Celia, she engages in femininity in a very playful way. When she is in the royal court, she is focused on survival, making herself appear disciplined and non-threatening. Then, when she crossdresses and pretends to be a youth named Ganymede for the second half of the play, she can experiment with masculinity as a lens through which to form new relationships.
Watching “As You Like It” was entrancing. As the audience, we found ourselves totally immersed in the world of the play. Just as the events of “As You Like It” occur in an uncanny world which is both full of familiar people (long-lost family and intimate friends to the characters) and somehow distant from the known world of the corrupt royal court, so too was watching SPT’s show an uncanny, dreamlike experience of familiarity and distance.
Sitting behind English House, a building where many of us take classes but don’t think to spend a few hours in the beautiful lawn and surrounding thicket, watching a spring day turn to a spring evening, was a magical experience.
