Welcome to Interlochen's interactive website regarding the 2020 Spring production of William Shakespeare's As You Like It. On this site you will find information about the play itself, what makes Interlochen's interpretation of the text unique, as well as learn about the cast and crew behind the show. This production was meant to be performed in April of this year on Interlochen's beautiful thrust Harvey stage. However, our current global climate has caused us to change our plans and given as an entirely new opportunity to learn as performers and make art unlike ever before. We work to adapt and grow and the show must go on. No social distancing orders will stop us from creating and sharing our work! Thank you for taking the time to explore this website and support the power of the arts in the midst of these uncertain and quite frightening times.

- Charlotte Kearns, AYLI Stage Manager

As You Like It: A Director's Take

In January 2020 when Interlochen's entire theatre company anxiously waited to hear from their faculty about callbacks for the Academy's upcoming Spring productions of As You Like It, A Chorus Line, and Men on Boats they had no idea that two months later they would be back in their homes around the country preparing and performing their shows online through video recordings and Zoom.

However, director Andrew McGinn's message to his called-back actors for the well-known Shakespearean comedy in late winter resonantes especially true now in the face of this pandemic. Andy wrote, "When I read [As You Like It], I don't see just a romantic comedy at all, but rather I see a deeply sensitive play about insecurity and the need to find Love in a dying and cruel world. Take these characters as seriously as you take yourselves. This need for love vs. the crippling impact of insecurity is all over this play, and for 95% of the play insecurity is winning. Let us bring ourselves to this play in earnest, with a deeply kind final gesture of accepting personal crisis as a part of becoming our best selves. Thus, we can in the end assure our audience who themselves are no-doubt in crisis, that they're okay; or wishing the audience's lives become 'As You Like It'."

Right now, we are unable to experience love in the ways that we are used to and many of our closest friends are visible only through a computer screen. However, with this play, we want to remind our audience that they are worthy of love even in this time when they might feel alone or scared. We want to use our art as a medium for comfort and entertainment and help give each audience member the feeling of connection they likely lack in this moment and time.

"This painting is a visual representation of Jaques’ monologue in Act II Scene VII. Elizabethan art was very prevalent during Shakespeare’s time. This style of art consists of many variations of theatrical elements that are prevalent in each painting. I wanted to keep that same theatricality through my painting by picking the line in this play that defines most art during that time. Jacques compares the world to a play and all of its people to actors on a stage called the world. He continues by describing people as “merely players” with predetermined paths. All people enter and exit into this world in the same way we are born and die. “All the world’s a stage,” challenges us, the audience, to believe that the mere idea of our existence is an act of entertainment. Jaques can’t help but indulge in his desolation about how nothing ultimately matters and everyone is willing to play their part in a play with seven acts. These seven acts represent the stages of life through death. Two players, Rosalind and Orlando, play their parts, unaware of being manipulated by death itself who is represented by the skeleton."-Dilara Naska

Curtain Call!

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