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As You Like It is most blatantly about love—as [director] Julie Fain Lawrence so beautifully put it in our interview in November: “searching for love, finding love, lack of love, yearning for love, filled with love, absence of love.” But there were a number of other themes that, throughout the rehearsal process, I found underscoring both the play itself and the process of creating the play. 

Transformation is the first of these. In many critics’ and actors’ articles about As You Like It, the Forest of Arden is referred to as almost a land of the imagination, a sort of alternate reality in which anything is possible—a woman may believably pass for a man, social status seems to level out, a clown can conceivably fall in love with a so-called “foul” maid, a man who once plotted the death of his younger brother becomes his best friend, and the “bad Duke” is transformed into a religious man. In Arden, status, societal roles, and gender roles are turned on their head. 

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Julie Fain Lawrence is an adjunct professor in MSU’s Department of Theatre and Dance and director of the department’s fall 2009 production of As You Like It (for which I am the dramaturg). AYLI is part of a new workshop initiative within the department and will be running in repertory with Polaroid Stories, come the beginning of December. I met with Julie (on Monday, November 2, 2009) in our very own Café Diem.  Amongst the hustle and bustle of the campus community in the midst of the fall semester, Julie shared her insights on the upcoming production… 

Kelly Karcher: The word “workshop” is being thrown around a lot in reference to As You Like It and Polaroid Stories. In terms of your production, and how you’re approaching it, what does that exactly mean? 

Julie Lawrence: I’m not approaching the play any differently than I would in terms of figuring out character work, what’s happening with the story, what’s happening in the text, what the words mean—so it really doesn’t mean anything different in terms of working with the actors. The only thing different to me is that, in essence, I’m my own sound designer, there are no lights other than lights up/lights down, costumes and set are just suggestive and minimal—so any production values that go along with the show are minimal and meant to be more symbolic than actualized. 

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