A hallmark of Shakespeare’s As You Like It is its playful exploration of identity and how people remake themselves when love, family, or circumstance force them into unfamiliar roles. As Rosalind famously observes in the play’s epilogue, “It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue, but it is no more unhandsome than to see the lord the prologue,” a line that gestures toward Shakespeare’s interest in performance, gender, and the fluidity of social roles. This fall, the Dean’s Men leaned fully into that spirit of reinvention with As Y’All Like It, treating identity not as something fixed but as something knowingly performed.
Performed in Reynolds Club’s Francis X Kinahan Theater on November 14 through 16, the production uses humor, caricatured acting, and clever technical cues to illuminate the messy, exhilarating dynamics of the relationships at the heart of Shakespeare’s comedy. What emerges is a production that succeeds through its clarity: third-year co-directors Ryan Witter and Seth Wang make the tangled world of Arden legible and lively by embracing exaggeration, musicality, and a deliberately accessible tone.
At its core, the play follows Rosalind (Department of Romance Languages and Literatures Assistant Lexie Vogel) as she is banished from the court and escapes with her cousin Celia (third-year Robert Stimpson) into a desert-like wilderness, where Rosalind adopts the disguise of “Ganymede.” Orlando (first-year Maela Mazzone), mistreated by her brother Oliver (first-year Henry Roth), also flees into the same strange frontier. Once there, mistaken identities, mismatched affections, and disguised flirtations unfold in a landscape populated by shepherds, fools, and the occasional wild animal.
In this production, hundreds of small directorial choices, from character-specific musical riffs to sharply stylized physicality, help the audience track shifting identities and relationships with surprising ease. The audience giggled before the shepherd’s entrance, which was cued with a long sheep noise—“Baaah.” For additional understanding, in any scene, one could look over to the right of the stage and see a puppet show—a sort of play within a play with a comical touch.
Rather than relying on subtlety, the show opts for clarity through comedy, turning each new arrival or romantic turn into an energetic beat the audience can instantly recognize. This emphasis on clarity was especially evident in Vogel’s performance as Rosalind. She plays the character with warmth and emotional transparency, grounding the show even as the tone remains heightened. Her shifts between Rosalind and Ganymede are clean and purposeful. As Ganymede, Vogel adopts a firmer physical stance and sharper humor, while Rosalind remains emotionally open and warm. The disguise becomes not just a plot device but a lens through which the production examines performance itself, how people alter their voices, postures, and humor when they want something.
In contrast, Touchstone (second-year Logan Carlson), the court fool who accompanies Rosalind into exile, brings an entirely different kind of energy: loud, flamboyant, and gleefully absurd. Carlson’s physical comedy and exaggerated line delivery are so outsized that they became a recurring source of laughter, and the production clearly intends that he embody the play’s most chaotic impulses. His contrast with Vogel makes the world of the show feel like a spectrum of “performed” identities, from grounded to theatrical to outright ridiculous.
Stimpson as Celia, played with bright-eyed earnestness, amplifies this theme further. His performance is almost cartoonishly expressive, constantly in motion, and filled with wide, exaggerated reactions that signal Celia’s emotional state before he even speaks. His style worked especially well in scenes where Celia acts as the audience’s surrogate, reacting to Rosalind’s schemes with a blend of loyal assent and alarm.
Mazzone’s Orlando, who serves as Rosalind’s primary love interest, brings a charming sincerity that balances well against Rosalind’s wit. Her performance captures Orlando’s youthful devotion without slipping into parody, helping to anchor the main romantic plot amid the production’s broader comedic style.
One of the clearest markers of Witter and Wang’s directorial vision is the integration of brief musical cues that play before different characters enter. Each character has a distinct sound, a plucky tune for one, a comedic riff for another, and these cues quickly become both a structural guide and a running joke. The audience learns to anticipate who is coming purely from sound, and the repetition makes the play’s many entrances feel intentional rather than chaotic. This device solves one of the challenges of Shakespeare’s comedies: helping an audience keep track of overlapping plot threads without pausing to explain them. Here, sound design becomes storytelling.
Design choices more broadly reinforce the production’s playful tone. The costumes exaggerate rather than aiming for historical accuracy, creating instantly readable archetypes: a flamboyant fool, an earnest romantic, a melancholy philosopher, a rugged shepherd. The desert aesthetic, sand-colored fabrics, warm lighting, and minimal scenic pieces works as a neutral backdrop that allows the actors’ physicality and comedic beats to pop. When a lion attack unfolds or a character swoons in heartbreak, the simplicity of the space makes these tonal leaps feel natural rather than jarring.
Not every choice lands perfectly. At times, the commitment to heightened acting edges toward overstatement, especially with multiple characters delivering big reactions simultaneously. But even these moments are forgivable because they serve the production’s guiding purpose: making Shakespeare’s text legible, humorous, and emotionally accessible. The ensemble’s willingness to lean fully into bold physicality keeps the energy high and the pacing brisk.
What ultimately makes As Y’All Like It successful is its understanding that Shakespearean comedy isn’t inherently delicate. Instead, it thrives on exaggeration, contradiction, and moments of delightful absurdity. The Dean’s Men embrace those elements unapologetically. By pairing bright, flamboyant performances with clever technical cues, it allows the relationships at the heart of the play to shine. Rosalind’s wit, Orlando’s earnestness, Celia’s loyalty, and Touchstone’s chaos all feel distinct yet cohesive within the same world.
Together, this production offers an interpretation that is both approachable and thoughtful. It takes a centuries-old play about love and mistaken identity and makes it feel newly readable, not by simplifying it, but by amplifying the parts that are already funny, strange, and deeply human. As Y’All Like It reminds the audience that confusion can be joyful, identity can be playful, and sometimes the best way to understand a complicated relationship is simply to laugh at it.
