The auditorium and the Black Box, or room 106, buzz with chatters after school ends. With the first production of the show “As you Like it” on April 23, performers rehearse there for hours.
“As You Like It” is a play written by Shakespeare about Rosalind, the main character, and her cousin escaping into a forest and finding Orlando, Rosalind’s true love. Orlando faces cruelty from his older brother Oliver, who denies Orlando his inheritance and plots to kill him. This drives Orlando into the forest, resulting in him meeting Rosalind.
Senior lead actress Elle Galhouse playing, Rosalind, believes that since Shakespeare’s plays are difficult to interpret, she works to make sure both she and her future audience understand the script.
“With reading the script, we look for cues in the pentameter to interpret what we’re saying,” Galhouse said. “But for the audience to get it, we have to focus a lot on the physicalities, how we’re moving and how we’re using our voice in different ways to show them what we mean.”
Like Galhouse, director Andrew Shaw acknowledges that Shakespeare plays have a language barrier. He has techniques to help his students interpret the script, including giving pop quizzes to test their understanding on the content.
“Once they have that understanding, then through their vocal and body language you really get a better sense of what’s being told,” Shaw said. “That’s why you can watch a silent film and still kind of get what’s going on because there are so many forms of communication we use.”
Galhouse and the other actors interpret the iambic pentameter, which is five meters of unstressed-stressed pattern, that Shakespeare uses throughout the dialogue in his plays. In addition, Galhouse works to make sure that her actions match the words of the play.
“The most important parts have a very different tone in how we deliver it,” Galhouse said. “It becomes less goofy and more of using our bodies to show how serious the scene is.”
Another cast member is senior Eva Obernberger, who plays Sir Oliver Martext. She looks at the online translations of the script to understand what she is supposed to act. Instead of diving into the Shakespearean phrases right away, she takes the time to interpret the sections.
“We work together a lot to understand it more,” Obernberger said. “So, I mean, yeah, it’s a little weird at first, but as you go on you can figure it out pretty soon.”
Students study Shakespear almost every year in English class. Senior Eva Obernberger and students in her AP Lit class enjoy Shakespeare, so she wants to perform well for them and the rest of the audience.
“One of the things that we work on a lot is diction, which is the clarity of tone,” Obernberger said. “Then a lot of focus on understanding the text so that you know how to act it out efficiently with the body movements for the audience to understand.”
“As You Like It” is the first Shakespeare play performed by the theater department since 2019. Shaw has also decided to make the play into a modern version by what he calls “putting a frame around it.” The original storyline will still be used but changed to be placed in the present day.
“We are kind of shifting what was in the original text,” Shaw said. “Rather than go from being exiled into a forest from a castle, we’re thinking of updating it to a corporate office in a major company to a sort of resort campground.”
The play will be performed April 23 through the 26, Thursday to Saturday at 7pm and Sunday at 4pm in the auditorium at CHS. Tickets are $15 for adults and $10 for students.
