The Kick & Push Festival – Rosalynde (or, As You Like It)
For a thespian, arguably one of the most exciting things about summertime is the opportunity to engage in some outdoor theatre in warm temperatures, hopefully under clear blue skies with a setting sun. Unfortunately, there are no such companies in Kingston that provide outdoor theatre (unlike Shakespeare in High Park in Toronto). Fortunately for us, however, the Kick & Push Festival arranged for Driftwood Theatre Company to engage audiences with their production of Rosalynde (or, As You Like It) in a night of outdoor theatre entertainment in Battery Park.
Set in the spring to fall of 1918, on the heels of the women’s suffrage movement and World War 1, this production also serves as an astute observation of a woman’s role in society exactly 100 years later, in our modern-day world of 2018. In the story, a distraught Rosalynde (Sochi Fried) –who is hopelessly in love with Orlando – flees to the Forest of Ardenne with her best friend Celia (Ximena Huizi) upon a banishment decree. In order to not be perceived as weak and vulnerable, Rosalynde disguises herself as a man named Ganymede and navigates the forest like so. Celia dresses as a shepherdess, in simple garbs as to not stand out. Similarly, Orlando (Ngabo Nabea), who reciprocates the love that Rosalynde has for him, also runs away to the Forest of Ardenne in an attempt to escape a murder plot by his brother Oliver (Derek Kwan). All these dramatic events are underscored (and sometimes satirized) by Touchstone (Geoffrey Armour) who frequently offers insight into the folly of human action, usually under the guise of an innuendo that must be interpreted for this meaning.
Like other Shakespearean comedies that take place in forests, a series of misunderstandings and unlucky encounters wind up creating a web of hilarious conflicts between the characters, which are then resolved in weddings and celebration. There existed a palpable chemistry between Fried and Huizi when they were performing, which sometimes made me question the supposed platonic nature of their characters’ relationship with one another, but augmented the authenticity their performances nonetheless. Alongside these women were Nabea and Kwan, who both did a brilliant job of raising the stakes in the story with their compelling performances. Finally, Armour gave audiences a stand-out performance in bringing the appropriate absurdity to the play, which only emphasized the audience’s surprise and poignancy of the wisdom he shares when he does share it. In addition to the actors was the assortment of puppets used to give the show an additional sense of whimsy, and were used to emphasize the absurdity of certain parts of the show.
The director D. Jeremy Smith also decided to employ gender-bent casting, and casted Jaques, Shakespeare’s famous melancholy traveler, as a woman (Caroline Gillis). This choice is significant, as it couples well with the play’s time period. In this rendition, experienced world traveler Jaques explains her melancholy as a result of disillusionment by the entire process of the women’s suffrage movement; although women got the right to vote in 1918, this right excluded many minority women and women of colour, and women weren’t officially declared ‘persons’ until 1929. At that time, white women were the only women fighting for women’s rights. Women of colour were not offered a seat at the table, and they did not have the agency to claim their own seat at that time. What’s worse, oftentimes they still don’t have agency. The hardships that manifested from these unfounded exclusions still exist today; awareness and advocacy for this equality is the central tenet of intersectional feminism. Today, many feminists who are women of colour still feel an active exclusion by their white counterparts, which only gets more painful over time.
With a racially and ethnically diverse cast, including an ethnically diverse female lead (Huizi as Celia), this production invites you to participate in this dialogue in one of the most relaxed settings – outdoors in a park surrounded by nature.
Rosalynde is on tour – you can catch it in Cobourg, Mississauga and Port Perry until August 12! Check out the schedule here.