Amanda N. Gunther | TheatreBloom
“Just think,” says our heroine to the
playwright John Dryden. “You can write about real women, real emotion, real
feminine feelings and they will all be played by a real woman!!” The men glance
at one another in quizzical, wide-eyed shock: who on earth would want to see
that?
Well, our Nellie knows. We all do. After all, wink, it’s the year
of the woman: 1665.
The real King John of England has a murky reputation. We know him for the Magna Carta. We know him as a villain from the tales of Robin Hood. And, at a stretch, we know him as Shakespeare’s earliest monarch, chronologically. Folger Theatre capitalizes on a chance to tell the rarely-told tale of this questionable king in its current production of Shakespeare’s King John, directed by Aaron Posner.
As the Folger describes,
Love is merely a madness; there is a madness running rampant through the forest of Arden— strewing its favors hither and thither, mostly in the form of poetic verse all about the stage and the house of The Folger Theatre. As You Like It, the Bard’s great love story among the comedies, comes to the 2017-side of the season under the Direction of Gaye Taylor Upchurch and brings with it a thorough examination of love in many flavorful varieties.
All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. On the Folger Theatre stage, they have their entrances and their exits, all overseen, given form and structure, and creatively envisioned by Director Gaye Taylor Upchurch. In a TheatreBloom exclusive interview, we sit down with the show’s Director to get her take on what’s up with As You Like It.
Thank you for giving us some time,