Story by Gini Davis

A group of Lane County home-schooled students staged an outdoor, abridged, Westernized production of William Shakespeare's pastoral romantic comedy, As You Like It on Saturday, Sept. 5 in Creswell's Harry Holt Memorial Park.

Directing the production was Melissa Norland, 26, who holds a degree in choral education and teaches at Springfield's Logos Academy, a resource for home-schooled students that offers advanced English and math, band, choir "and other classes that are harder to do at home," Norland explained.

Cast members as young as 11 from throughout the Eugene/Springfield area, including Creswell, Cottage Grove and Veneta, began preparing their Shakespearean production during an "exciting, exhausting" week-long camp in June and then rehearsed throughout July and every other day in August, Norland said.

"Everyone worked very hard to learn their lines and put this together," Norland related, noting that some cast members played multiple small parts.

As You Like It, an early play of Shakespeare's that remains an audience favorite, features several entangled love affairs and is set primarily in the Forest of Arden, making it a play that lends itself particularly well to outdoor staging.

Chosen because "I know the play and thought it would be a good one for us to do," Norland noted that As You Like It, as is the case with many Shakespearean plays, features multiple plot and thematic elements, making it "pretty easy to pick one and pull that thread out" if necessary for an abridged production.

"We wanted to do a whole play, not an abridged version, but there were not enough kids," Norland said. "We had to be really creative with such a small cast."

As a stock romantic comedy, a happy outcome is never in doubt in As You Like It. As a pastoral play, its themes are those of restoration and regeneration, communicated through the triumph of humanistic Christian values such as brotherly love, marriage, tolerance and optimism.

In the abridged play performed in Creswell, which dropped a number of minor characters and their subplots, Rosalind, played by Norland, and her cousin Celia, played by Shannon Peet, flee into the Forest of Arden after Rosalind is banished from the court of Celia's father, Duke Frederick, usurper of Rosalind's father, Duke Senior.

Accompanying the girls (now disguised, respectively, as the youth Ganymede and the maid Aliena) into the forest is the court jester, Touchstone, played to great effect by the scene-stealing Maddi Oster, armed at various times with a sock puppet, a guitar and signs bearing humorous commentary on the main action, such as "Pu-leez" and "Gag."

"Maddi did amazing work," praised Norland. "She had to learn how to do a sock puppet, and it's harder than it looks to make a puppet function as a character."

Rosalind's suitor, Orlando (Kevin Peet), accompanied by his faithful servant, Adam (Micah Jones), encounters "Ganymede" and "Aliena" in the forest, where the exiled Duke Senior (Cami Ortlorff) and his supporter, the melancholy lord Jaques (Katie Fisher) now reside.

It is Jaques who in Act II delivers one of Shakespeare's most famous monologues. Chronicling the seven ages of man, from cradle to grave, it begins, "All the world's a stage,/And all the men and women merely players:/They have their exits and their entrances;/And one man in his time plays many parts,/His acts being seven ages..."

Comedy ensues when "Ganymede" undertakes to "cure" Orlando of his love for Rosalind by proposing to act her part while Orlando woos her.

Ultimately, Orlando's older brother Oliver, who repents of mistreating his brother and driving him from the duchy, falls in love with "Aliena" and both pairs of lovers (with the women's true identities now revealed) are wed.

Duke Frederick also repents and restores his brother to his rightful place in the dukedom to close the play.

"Everybody did a great job," Norland commented after the small cast had taken its bows to enthusiastic applause.

The group, which last year staged the play-within-a-play from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Beatrice-and-Benedict plotline from Much Ado About Nothing, hopes to return to Creswell with another outdoor Shakespearean production next summer, Norland added.