"It's really like the circus coming to town," says Steven Maler, artistic director of the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company. To mount a three-night engagement of As You Like It in Forest Park Aug. 8-10, Maler's troupe will head west from Boston with two trucks for the trusses and staging, two trucks of lights, one truck of wardrobe, one truck of sound equipment, and three backstage trailers. They'll make quite a caravan heading west on the Massachusetts Turnpike.
What those trucks will be carrying is the same stage, set and equipment that the troupe will be performing with one weekend earlier in Boston. And it's no tiny stage. Think rock concert. Think a full Broadway production. Think Tanglewood lawn-style seating. And you can see the show for free.
"We build it from the ground up," Maler says. "There's a field there, and then there's a beautiful production there."
Commonwealth Shakespeare has been putting on free performances of Shakespeare plays on the Boston Common since 1996, but this is the first year that the troupe will take its act on the road to the western part of the state. "We're really excited to be bringing the production to Western Mass.," Maler says. He says 600,000 to 700,000 people have attended the performances in Boston over the years and he hopes that 10,000 or more people will be able to see the three performances in Springfield. The free Shakespeare performances are produced in partnership with the Citi Performing Arts Center in Boston, one of the city's leading arts organizations.
As You Like It is a play that lends itself to outdoor theater. Much of it is set in Shakespeare's invented Forest of Arden, where the exiled duke, Duke Senior, and his court retire after being usurped by Duke Frederick. A pastoral comedy, it features some of Shakespeare's hallmarks: women dressing up as men; a wise, if cynical, fool; and a happy ending, complete with four marriages. The character of Rosalind, the female lead who dresses up as a man to pursue her love interest, Orlando, is often called "the female Hamlet" for her self-discovery.
There are two themes in the play that interest Maler, and the first is its portrayal of love. In each of the four relationships of the play, Shakespeare gives different perspectives on love. The effect, Maler says, is much like a pointillist painting. "These little dots of your understanding" of the individual character's views on love add up to a whole in the play. "When you step back, you see the whole painting," Maler says.
The other theme is the effect of the exile: as Maler puts it, "the discovery of what's important to you by the loss of what you cherish." Duke Senior has been exiled to the forest, which forces him to learn what's really important to him. Similarly, Rosalind's disguised journey into the forest brings her to discover things about herself "that she would never have discovered if she didn't go on the journey."
Maler says that this year's production of As You Like It will be inspired by 1930s and 1940s France, with the forest setting in the south of France. But rather than being overly literal, the production aims for a "silhouette that they [the audience] recognize," Maler says. "We don't want to put a filter on the play that makes audiences feel as if they don't resonate or connect with them."
Forest Park is not the same sort of park that the Boston Common is, where people are likely to wander by in the normal course of their day, but all the same, Maler hopes people will see the trucks arriving, or will happen to be in the park during the week while the production is setting up and will be curious enough to come back on the weekend for the show.
Part of the mission of Commonwealth Shakespeare is to "break the doors open" to theater. Maler says that outdoor performances take theater out of the rarefied spaces it often appears in. The idea is to broaden the audience for theater, bringing the bard's work to people who "typically don't think of themselves as theatergoers or Shakespeare fans," Maler says. In his experience with the Boston productions, the troupe draws a broad cross-section of the city.
"Our hallmark is that we bring an exciting new vision to the productions," Maler says. "We bring a vitality and an energy to the productions that is very beguiling to the audiences." He hopes to dispel the notion that Shakespeare is only for the educated elite, that even first-time theatergoers will see that "this belongs to them, too. Shakespeare belongs to everybody. When he was writing, he was writing for everybody."
The Commonwealth Shakespeare Company's As You Like It plays at Forest Park, Springfield (at Picknelly Field) Aug. 8-10, 7:30 p.m., www.commshakes.org. Performances are free.
