On February 12, SHS Drama premiered their showing of As You Like It, a classic Shakespearean comedy about love and adventure, reimagined to be set in the 1960s. The story focused on Rosalind, a clever and strong-willed young woman who is forced to flee her home after her uncle, Duke Frederick, banishes her from his court. Disguising herself as a young man named Ganymede, Rosalind escapes to the Forest of Arden with her cousin, Celia, and the court jester, Touchstone. In the forest, modernized into a hippie commune, they encounter a variety of colorful characters including Jaques and the loyal Orlando who has fallen deeply in love with Rosalind.

The play had a large focus on language, utilizing quips and puns within the Shakespearean language to provide comedic relief. In turn, this had an impact on how the actors learned their lines.

“The speech was very different because it’s Shakespeare,” said Myr Lee, senior who played Celia. “Some of our lines in the script sound way out of place; sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t work as well.”

Lee has been doing drama since their sophomore year of high school. They have participated in both the acting and tech aspects, as well as participating in AFS Showcase.

Another change that set As You Like It apart from other shows was its amphitheater style seating. The entire audience sat on seats directly around the actors. This allowed for some audience to actor interactions as well as bringing a whole new set of challenges to the actors and tech.

“It was really tedious to build all the seating because it was basically the same stuff over and over again,” said Theo Stearns, sophomore in tech. “It took a really long time to build, like the back wall because it was super high up and we had to build it from the pit, which is a lot lower than the actual stage.”

Stearns is a part of both the build crew and the run crew. The build crew works on building the set and for this show they also produced all the seating. As a part of the run crew, Stearns goes on stage to change parts of the set during the show to make sure the flow of the performance is not disrupted. 

“I thought the on stage seating was really cool,” Stearns said. “I think the last time we did that was a couple years ago, so it’s nice to do it again. I thought it was an interesting experience, both for the audience members and for the actors.”

The seating also created a special environment for the actors, altering how they would project their voices to the crowd.

“When you project, it’s a bit different because I’m used to projecting to one kind of flat area,” Lee said. “Then in this way it would be weird if I shouted to one person [when] I’m surrounded by everyone.”

Another difference in the play was how the run crew operated. Typically they are dressed in all black, allowing them to change the scene as quickly as possible under the cover of darkness. However, for As You Like It the crew dressed up in army camo, including them in the show differently than usual.

“It would have been too difficult to hide our moves and stuff so they just decided to put us in costume for when we were bringing stuff on and off stage,” Stearns said. “It was supposed to be off-duty Vietnam soldiers because it was set in the 60s, and we were just there to help the main villain.”

Lee had to overcome a couple challenges while learning her role. Moments of silence or awkward pauses left an uneasy feeling that was hard to shake.

“One of the challenges for me is that Celia has a lot of scenes where she doesn’t say anything, so sometimes it would feel really, really awkward,” Lee said. “Sometimes, when I did speak, I just had trouble with that, because I felt as if I shouldn’t. Then at one point, Sheaffer said that I was supposed to feel really awkward, so that kind of helped, and by the end of it, I didn’t feel awkward anymore.”

Shahzada Shah, a senior playing the Duke, shared that the culmination of all the hard work makes it worth all the effort.

“When everyone was on the stage the play came together and everyone felt the emotion of it,”  Shah said.

Lee agrees that after the time spent rehearsing the end product paid off, leading to a result they were proud of. 

“I really liked it; it was my favorite play so far,” Lee said. “The rehearsal process was pretty fun. I have only properly been in musicals before, so I did miss the singing and dancing aspect, and in that way, it kind of felt like less. But I felt pretty good about it, especially towards the end. I really liked doing tech, and it was really fun with the cast.”