Coming Home to Our Forest: 
As You Like It

By Dramaturg Philippa Kelly

At the apex of living and growing is the goal of selfhood – as teens, parents, professionals, disappointed or fulfilled lovers, we humans strive ever-upward. But it’s also true that at the heart of living and growing is the loss of selfhood. Circumstances and relationships change – and as sure as we live on this earth, we’ll become exiles from something: from youth, jobs, social groups, families, identities. This is the scenario that Jaques describes in the famous “All the world’s a stage” speech, in which life is represented as a long and arduous journey through various stages of disenchantment. (#glasshalfempty for Jaques!) Jaques lives in what we might call “pre-regret,” a state of being in which everything in life follows an expected lugubrious path to eventual extinction. But our play (and this production!) requites the darkness of loss with the light of discovery. Yes, exile can yield deprivation and emptiness: but this very vacant space can also burst with opportunity as we step, run or stumble from the past into the unknown forests of the future.

Specifically, As You Like It is full of disintegrated families. A mother has lost a daughter, while another daughter chooses to leave behind the father who has failed his family bonds. Two sons have lost a father, as well as each other; two other brothers have lost all bonds of birthright. And yet such loss in the biological family makes room for characters to build new families that better serve their changing ideals and beliefs. As each exile in As You Like It crosses over from the Court to the Forest of Arden, we, the audience, get the chance to experience their mixture of surprise, alienation and anticipation. With varying degrees of fear and delight, As You Like It’s characters discover that their “selves” are more than the identities they once inhabited in the court: exiled to the forest, a Duke can become a stoic philosopher; a forlorn son can become an ambassador for love; a young woman can shuck off the gender constraints that once limited her choices; new families can be built in the rubble of failed biological relationships; and even those who’ve been rejected as “evil” can eventually become good-people-in-waiting. We will never lose our past selves – we’ve lived in them, we’ve shaped our lives through them. But we can be more than those past selves, understanding life all the more richly for having acknowledged and embraced change.

In such transformations, Shakespeare juxtaposes love and loss as heralds to change. As we follow our characters on their journeys from Court to Forest and from loss to reimagining, we can also find humor and hope, and a gateway to the future. Far from seeing life as a series of regrettable aches and nose-dives, we can choose rebirth – but in order to find this, we have to let go. That’s the hard thing, the scary thing.The wonder that is life – and theatre.

This playbill article is dedicated to my mother, Marie Kelly, who recently crossed through, and beyond, the Forest of Arden.