Oregon Shakespeare Festival's "As You Like It"

This post is about my experience seeing As You Like It at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Over spring break, I went to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and saw their production of As You Like It. The play follows Rosalind, Orlando, and Duke Senior who have fled to the Forest of Ardenne. Duke Senior has been banished by the court and lives in the forest with his followers, Orlando is in love with Rosalind and is trying to find her, and Rosalind is dressing as a boy to hide from the court. The OSF decided to take this gender bend even farther by turning the outcast duke and his followers into women.

I have never read this play and knew very little about it going into it, but I knew the creators of this production were really pushing the significance of the gender aspect. The explanation in the program made it seem like they had made some very significant alterations in this regard, but in the end, I found it very underwhelming. Yes, they did change the genders of the duke and the duke’s followers to women, but they didn’t really do anything about it. They didn’t change the characters or the scenes they were in in any other notable ways. I expected some other significant change to occur as a result of the gender change, but it never came. It makes me wonder what the point of making this change was if they aren’t really doing anything about it. There were many scenes that took place in the forest where it was only the duke and her band of followers and it would have been so interesting to see them emphasize the importance of having an all-woman anti-society and the politics of that space, but they paid it no mind. To me, the play really fell short of my expectations and what it was sold as.

One thing I did find incredible about this production was the trans actors that appeared on stage. The duke was played by a trans woman and another, smaller role, was played by a non-binary actor. It was honestly incredible to me to see trans actors doing Shakespeare at such a major festival. It is still rare to see trans actors in movies and on TV and I imagine that is even more true for the stage, especially in such a traditional production like a Shakespeare play. Though they made a big deal of the role reversals, they did not advertise these trans actors in any major way, which I loved. They were just like all the other actors on stage and it was so special to see.