Dear Friends,

As the two of us began dreaming of this production of As You Like It, we were thinking about the ways that so much of the conflict in our world today arises from binary thinking – the unnuanced and unimaginative notion that a person, a community, a country can only be one thing or its opposite.

In diving back into As You Like It, we saw how perfectly it communicates the peril of this kind of thinking, and how Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy from four centuries ago has so much to say to us right now. Act I places us in the rigidly-structured court of Duke Frederick, but when the action moves to the Forest of Arden – a place of infinite possibilities – the characters begin to see, appreciate and fall in love with the endless complexities in each other – and themselves.

It was exciting to realize that this play had so much complexity at its core, and that with this company of trans, non-binary and Queer performers, we were going to be able to make visible that kind of power that’s already living in the text. If one of the theatre’s jobs is to propose possible worlds, then the world of the forest – one defined by expansion of the self, where lives can be lived off the binary – is a joyous one to bring to audiences.

One of the touchstones of our production is a young adult book we’ve both long loved: Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. An unfettered imagination and curiosity can grow an entire forest out of the room you’re in, and when you come back to that room at the end of your journey, both it and you have been fundamentally changed.

It’s with that same sense of curiosity and imagination that we explored the casting and music in our production. This incredibly talented group of performers self-identified the roles they were most interested in playing. The songs from Shakespeare’s original text have been replaced by covers of contemporary music that interact with the story in thematically parallel ways.

As You Like It is a show that speaks to our current moment of conflict and possibility, and as two collaborators with very different life experiences, it has been our great good fortune to join forces and create our own Forest of Arden in La Jolla.

Christopher Ashley & Will Davis
Directors, As You Like It