As You Like It

An ever-tocking pendulum is the dominating element of Kevin Depinet’s handsomely designed set for Griffin’s production of Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy. Encased in a hovering column that suggests the cabinet of a grandfather clock, it watches over the establishing scenes at the royal court. Orlando (Schwader) chafes at the hostility of his brother Oliver (Jeff Parker), and Rosalind (Fry) and her cousin Celia (Cross) endure the conspiracy-theorist capriciousness of Celia’s father the Duke, who banished Rosalind’s father. Rosalind and Orlando fall in love at first sight.

Curiously, the pendulum keeps ticking in the air even after the set opens up to the lush Forest of Arden, where the courtiers escape in search of both Rosalind’s wrongly exiled father and romantic freedom. The clock motif might be seen as a literalization of the melancholy Jaques’s rundown of the incontrovertible stages of man, or for the cynical lessons of courtship that Rosalind, disguised as a boy, provides Orlando. But Griffin’s light touch doesn’t match up with such potentially pensive interpretations. Indeed, almost every element of his production seems too ready to dismiss itself; above all else, the director appears to be most eager to get on to the next scene. If not for the innate appeal of a cast led by the effortlessly charming Fry and Schwader, along with Phillip James Brannon’s almost too contemporary wise fool Touchstone, this by-the-numbers production wouldn’t give us much to like.