As You Like It- A Radio Play Experiment
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Words from the team
Director’s Notes
As You Like It is a story about people leaving behind the lives they know in pursuit of something more free, more full of laughter and love and possibility. Whether these characters are forced to leave or go voluntarily, each braves uncertainty and danger for a chance at a life that is more human.
Our approach frames Arden not only as a magical forest of possibility, but also as a place of authenticity, exploration, and community. By contrast, the court of Frederick is cold, disingenuous, and performative. In other words, more corporate.
We wanted to focus on warmth, celebration, and positivity—to welcome spring rather than focusing on the extended “winter” we have all been through. And so, our “Arden” centers around the warmest, most community-centered spot we could think of—the cozy, overgrown, often hodgepodge indoor/outdoor local coffee shops that so many of us know and love.
Our production of As You Like It is a radio play with an accompanying visual design piece. The radio play portion was recorded across March in purpose-built recording booths on one of our stages. This allowed for actors to take masks off in the protected booths and, using the clear plexiglass sides, to see and respond to each other in the space as they recorded their lines. After each scene was recorded, the audio was cut, edited, and recombined before the sound effects (partially generated by student performers) were included to evoke the narrative audio quality of classic radio plays.
We have also created a curated and narrative supporting visual multimedia package that honors the process, the collaboration, and the work that goes into doing what we do. Here audience members will see storyboards, sketches, renderings, light plots, etc. along with some moments of animation, images from rehearsal, actors in costume, and more!
Most of all, we want to celebrate the hard work and incredible sacrifice of our students. Despite all of the challenges, anxiety, and frustration of the last 18 months, our students continued to show up, to learn, to sew masks, to create their own art, to stage theatre despite all of the restrictions. Time and time again, our students proved to us that the dream of Arden is not an unattainable fantasy but rather an idea that we create together.
Please enjoy the University of Wyoming Department of Theatre & Dance’s production of As You Like It.
By Dr. Patrick Konesko
Land Acknowledgement
We collectively acknowledge that the University of Wyoming occupies the ancestral and traditional lands of the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, and Shoshone Indigenous peoples along with other Native tribes who call the Great Basin and Rocky Mountain region home. We recognize, support, and advocate alongside Indigenous individuals and communities who live here now, and with those forcibly removed from their Homelands.
Associated Students of the University of Wyoming
Laramie, WY, is located on territory traditionally inhabited by a number of Indigenous peoples, including the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, Shoshone, and Sioux. Tribal borders were permeable and ever-evolving prior to Euro-American incursion on Native lands. Throughout the 19th century, the U.S. government signed over 600 treaties with Native tribes, displacing Indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands and steadily encroaching further and further onto these territories.
In 1862 and 1890, the U.S. government passed the Morrill Acts, which set aside expropriated Indigenous lands for the support of higher education. The first iteration of the act redistributed nearly 11 million acres across 24 states. Land-grant universities profited not only from the physical spaces on which their campuses were built, but also from lands that, in some cases, lay hundreds or thousands of miles away. Indigenous students were frequently barred from enrollment at the very institutions built on and supported by Native land, and Indigenous students, faculty, and staff remain significantly underrepresented at these institutions today.
The University of Wyoming was founded in 1886. According to a High Country News investigation, the university was assigned a land grant for 89,849 acres in 1889, ceded from eight tribal nations across the territory that would officially become the state of Wyoming the following year. The United States paid a total of $1,954 for this land, taken from the Crow, Cheyenne of Upper Arkansas, Arapaho of Upper Arkansas, Shoshone, Bannock, Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho nations. The latter three received no payment at all.
Members of the As You Like It creative team hail from all over the United States, from the Pacific Northwest to New England to Southern Appalachia. Our collaboration in virtual space has allowed us to contribute to this project not only from Laramie, but also from hundreds of miles apart, on lands that were first occupied by Indigenous peoples of richly diverse histories, cultures, and ways of life. Hover over the stars on the interactive map below to learn more. Each star represents one or more of our team members’ home bases.
By Dr. Miriam Hahn Thomas
The information on this map is drawn primarily from research by the nonprofit organization Native Land Digital (native-land.ca). Per the organization’s disclaimer: “This map does not represent or intend to represent official or legal boundaries of any Indigenous nations. To learn about definitive boundaries, contact the nations in question.”
Links to the websites of many of the tribal nations represented here are included on Native Land Digital’s interactive map.
For further reading:
Dramaturg’s Notes
Welcome to the forest of Arden. Here, rigid power structures give way to a freer, inclusive community where our characters will reinvent and rediscover themselves. Deliberately or unknowingly, the heroes and villains of As You Like It undergo myriad transformations, some temporary and others permanent. Not one character leaves the forest of Arden unchanged, and that is all for the good in this popular comedy.
Though frequently performed today, As You Like It has a vague production history until the 1700s. Published in the First Folio along with most of Shakespeare’s other plays, As You Like It may have been the first play performed at the Globe Theatre, but sadly there is no record of that performance, if indeed it took place. In more recent times, though, the play has enjoyed immense popularity. Its brilliant heroine, Rosalind, is one of Shakespeare’s most iconic characters. Often compared to Hamlet, Rosalind has the most lines of any female Shakespeare character.
In fact, Rosalind (or Rosalynde) was once the story’s title character: As in most of his plays, Shakespeare took an existing story (or stories) and made it his own. Rosalynde, a pastoral romance novel by Thomas Lodge, was the source for As You Like It, and Rosalynde itself borrows from an earlier work called the Tale of Gamelyn. Shakespeare’s version of the story is less violent and more comedic, parodying the popular pastoral genre, which originated in Ancient Greece and idealized the countryside. He also created some of As You Like It’s most memorable characters, including the melancholy Jaques, whose “Seven Ages of Man” is among Shakespeare’s most famous monologues.
The clever fool Touchstone is another Shakespearean addition. Fools and clowns are often found in Shakespeare’s plays, from Feste in the comedy Twelfth Night to Lear’s fool to the deceased Yorick in Hamlet. In cultures without freedom of speech, jesters were permitted to joke about subjects forbidden to other commoners and even nobles. Fools like Touchstone were not exempt from punishment if they went too far, however, and in a court like Duke Frederick’s even a professional fool would have to tread carefully.
In our production, the court is envisioned as a modern corporation. Though our courtiers wear business suits instead of armor, they embrace the same rigid hierarchy and vicious competition as their Renaissance counterparts. In both these cultures, there are insiders and outsiders, with few roles in between. Insiders themselves are unsafe from usurpation and exist under the constant fear of being ousted, doing anything they can to stay in the corporation another day. Even Touchstone, an outsider with some power to look in and comment on what he sees, has to choose sides when Rosalind is banished from court.
Once our cast enters the forest of Arden, however, everything changes. Whatever their reasons for going into the forest, every character discovers freedoms and possibilities unknown at court. Rosalind takes full advantage of this new freedom by taking on the guise of a young man, but hers is not the only drastic transformation to take place. The exiled Duke Senior and his loyal friends find a peace unknown at court, settling into a less formal, more tolerant society. Men who enter the forest intent on revenge find grace and forgiveness where it is least expected and, most famously, four couples marry.
Transformation extends past the world of the play. In Shakespeare’s time, all female roles were played by boys or men. When his comedic heroines disguised themselves as men (this happens quite often in Shakespeare), Renaissance audiences would have seen men playing women playing men. As you will soon see, Rosalind takes another layer of identity when she “pretends'' to be herself! During the epilogue, Rosalind says she would kiss members of the audience if she were actually a woman, making her Shakespeare’s only heroine who refers directly to the male actor that originally played her role.
English actresses finally had the chance to perform in 1660, and since then actors of all genders have enjoyed acting in As You Like It. In our production, some of the actors have taken on the challenge of playing another gender, while others have flipped their characters’ genders and brought new meanings to the roles.
As the strict, tense court life gives way to the more peaceful, contemplative forest, we hope you too will feel the joy and wonder of Arden. Soon our characters will begin their journeys, and many will redefine themselves for the better. We invite you to join us as we delve deeply into the forest of Arden in search of love, self-discovery, and hope.
By Jessica Sager, with research by John Eleshuk
