Student Blog: As You Like It

In 2017, the Public Theater put on a production of As You Like It as a part of their iconic Free Shakespeare in the Park. The show is a musical adaptation of Shakespeare's comedy, adapted by Shaina Taub and Laurie Woolery. As a part of the Public Works program, As You Like It brings in performers from all five boroughs of New York City, aiming "to restore and build community by connecting people through the creation of extraordinary works of art." The community is the core of the show, giving everyone a chance to be seen on stage.

As You Like It was originally meant to be performed for the second time in the 2020 season but was shut down by COVID. A documentary, "Under the Greenwood Tree," was made with ALL ARTS focused on both the 2017 Public Works production of As You Like It and how the "resilient community has banded together amidst the crises of 2020."

Recently, I had the chance to speak with Christopher M. Ramirez, who is playing Touchstone in the Public's musical adaptation of As You Like It.

Kat: So how did you first get involved with Public Works and Shakespeare in

the Park?

Christopher: Well, I've been dreaming about it for like, over 10 years now. I've wanted to work not only for the Public but beyond that, Shakespeare in the Park. Growing up, I watched so many great productions that they recorded through the years, as far back as the '80s. All the greats have worked on this stage and so I've wanted to work here for a long time. I graduated from grad school a little over a year ago. And so I had my sights set on working here, but I didn't imagine that I would be here this soon! I told my agents in January, they [the Public] hadn't even announced the season, that I wanted to get an audition for Shakespeare in the Park this summer. I was like, "What do I need to do?" And they said, "You know what? Give us a second." So he gets back to me like 30 minutes later. The casting director said that they're doing Comedy of Errors with the Mobile Unit. And it's all Latine. And so I was like, "Oh, that's so exciting!" He said, "Let me work on that. They're excited to at least get you in the room." And so I said, "Great." And then I let go, "let God" as they say, and I didn't hear anything for a long time. So I was auditioning for some other projects. I was supposed to do a project in San Diego, that's actually another Shaina Taub adaptation, of Twelfth Night, which they [the Public] did a couple of years ago . . .

Kat: Yeah, I saw that one!

Christopher: And so I was actually supposed to play the role that my co-star here, Ato [Blankson-Wood], originated, the Duke Orsino. I was really excited, but unfortunately, that fell through. Literally the next day, I got an audition for As You Like It with Shakespeare in the Park. My heart was kind of broken because I wasn't gonna get to do that other one. I was just at a place where I was like, "They're gonna pick some incredible people to work on that. Should I even try? I'm not in a good place . . ." And my partner and friends were like, "No, this is your chance. Maybe this is what was supposed to happen. Everything happens for a reason. What's meant for you won't miss you." And so I put my everything into that audition, I was working on another project, another play at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Quixote Nuevo, a beautiful play by Octavio Solis. I somehow managed to put together an audition I was really proud of! I was following my sense of creativity and my curiosity, and I just had a lot of fun recording the audition. My sister was working on Suffs at the time, at the Public. And she said, "I can't say anything, but apparently, everybody was really excited about your tape."

Kat: Ooh!

Christopher: And I was like, "Oh my gosh!" Anyway, I ended up having a call back the following Monday and it was one of the best callbacks I've ever had in my life. It was on Zoom and I was there for over an hour. We were singing, we were doing the scenes, we were also just talking about our love for Shakespeare and for collaboration, influencing the love of other people for Shakespeare as well. I felt so good about it. And at the end of it, Laurie Woolery basically said, "Whether this works out or not, I want you to know that I love your artistry. I love who you are as an artist and don't ever lose that." And I was like, "You know what? I don't even care if I get this job - I've done what I needed to do." How often do you feel that leaving an audition, especially at the program at the theater that is your biggest dream? The next day, they offered the role of Touchstone to me, and I have been in heaven ever since.

Kat: You were talking about your love for Shakespeare. Have you always been a fan of Shakespeare?

Christopher: I'm gonna be honest with you. For a long time, I didn't feel like there was a space for me in it. I didn't feel like there was a space for Latine people in Shakespeare. That was just part of my ignorance and also just some of the things from my undergrad that were not good for my self-esteem. Little did I know some of the greats that have been on the Delacorte like Raul Julia, playing Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew. An incredible Shakespearean performer and actor. One of my first introductions to the theater was a Shakespeare camp that my aunt and uncle put my sister and me in when I was like, eight years old. I was always putting on skits, and I was always singing, but I didn't really have any influence in my immediate family to look at Shakespeare. But I remember we did that camp and we just had so much fun doing it. We were doing selections from Twelfth Night and I played Sir Toby. I just remember having so much fun playing that. And also the kind of people that were in the theater really aligned with who I am and who I was. And then we got to go to London and saw some Shakespeare. So that planted the seed of and love for acting. But I didn't really fall in love with Shakespeare until five years ago when I auditioned for grad school. I auditioned for grad school twice - I didn't get in the first time. So if anybody has aspirations to go to grad school, just keep trying. And that really made me fall in love with it because I had to put in all this work to find the right pieces that spoke to me. And at that point, I was like, "Oh, gosh, this is very foreign to me . . . I don't really know what they're saying." But then, when you really get to the heart of the words and language and the stories that have withstood the test of time, you just find there's so much depth and life and humanity within them. They just get into your drill into your heart, you know? When I was a kid, I always wanted to be the villain. And so, looking at some of these iconic, villainous characters in Shakespeare like Angelo in Measure for Measure or Iago in Othello, I just found that it was so juicy. Juicier than being like, "Kill them. Kill them all." It's more cunning. There's so much meat in there . . . So I think what I fell in love with. If you're playing a villainous role, you don't think you're a villain. You start to find the humanity in these kinds of people. And it just opened up my eyes to the world and changed my perspective about the world in that way as well as giving everyone grace and the benefit of the doubt to a certain extent So the stories really started to speak to me but at that time, I didn't feel like I was equipped to really understand what was going on. And then when I went to grad school, I started being on course to really understanding it more, but it's going to be a lifelong, joyous journey. These stories are so much bigger than we are, even though it is about us. My true love of Shakespeare is actually very young. It's very new, and working here has only expanded it even more. I've completely fallen in love with my character, Touchstone. I hope I do him justice.

Kat: What is it been like adapting a Shakespearean work as a musical versus the play itself?

Christopher: I love Shaina Taub's adaptations because she uses the actual text. There's something about them that I just respect and value so much. The verse and the prose . . . the poetry is so amazing as it is. But then on top of that, she marries it so well with musical theatre, because in musical theater, what we do whenever we can't express things in words anymore is we break into song, right?

Kat: Yeah.

Christopher: So I feel like Shakespeare is similar to that. Shakespeare being translated into a musical is like the perfect marriage. It's been really awesome. This is a 90-minute version of a play that would probably take two and a half to three hours, depending on how you direct it. And so obviously we've condensed it down and taken out a lot of text, but the bulk of the scene work in this show is the actual text. I love that they kept so many iconic moments. You see how well Shaina Taub massages her point of view, and her music, into it. So I think the adaptation with Shaina and Laurie Woolery is really just a delightful marriage of those two worlds. As an actor who started in musical theatre, and then went back to school to "conquer" the Bard, it's kind of everything I've ever wanted. It's two loves coming together. And it's nice too because it is arcane text. For some people, it can be daunting to understand it. And so what happens is, we have a scene, and then we have Shaina's music, and her songs reinforce the scene, helping the audience to understand and reinforce what they just watched. So it's really great. For the young Shakespeareans out there, the "scholars of the future," they're gonna love it because it's a way to invite people into these larger plays. I love that we have this condensed version with music because it makes it accessible to everyone.

Kat: Have you been reading the original As You Like It along with your script to understand your character better?

Christopher: I've been reading one, two . . . I sound so pretentious!

Kat: *Laughs* I have the Folger, I have the RSC . . .

Christopher: I have the Folger on a PDF! I have the RSC, I have two versions of the Arden, and then some other random one, a little one that I picked up in the Drama Book Shop. I think my favorite edition is the Arden. But I will say, with Touchstone, it's Act One, Scene Two, and it's our first introduction to Touchstone the clown. And he goes on this long tangent about these pancakes mustard and it's just like, "What the heck is that?" It's been really fun to navigate and figure it out - What does that mean to me? What does that mean in our show? How do we make sense of that? I assumed they were just like pancakes. But then I found this obscure edition and the pancakes were traditionally made out of meat, like meat cakes. That makes more sense to put mustard on that as opposed to mustard on a pancake as we would see it. And that's what I love about getting into the footnotes. They help you extraordinarily because sometimes, you're so sure about the definition of a word, And then you realize in the past that it had a completely different definition!

Kat: Footnotes are important.

Christopher: Right? I also use the Oxford English Dictionary. It can take a long time to get through, because I find myself sometimes looking up the word "the," just to be like, "What does that mean?"

Kat: Am I sure I know what that means?

Christopher: *Laughs* We use language all the time to navigate. It's like our companion throughout our lives - It helps us connect with other people and craft the sense of self. Sometimes I'm like, "Wow, I use this word all the time! Do I know what it means?" That's another thing I love about Shakespeare. It gives me that challenge of rubbing elbows with language, trying to understand it more. I feel like it's made me a better communicator. But to answer your question, I've used quite a few different editions. And they do help a lot because you can go back and sometimes punctuation will be different between editions. You look at it and you're so certain about the way you're delivering the line, but you could get stuck and you go back and they move a comma, like one word over. All of a sudden, you're like, "Oh my gosh! This sentence's meaning has completely changed!"

Kat: The power of the comma!

Christopher: The power of the comma and punctuation. Touchstone plays with language so much in the play - It's his source of currency. I won't take credit for that, that's Laurie, our fearless director. And so you see how Touchstone plays with it and uses it to get people on his side to entertain. But, I think about his brain as not being all these words and all funny, witty things that are organized like in a Rolodex. He is brilliant because he has all these words, but they're not organized. It's like a bunch of dirty clothes heaped up in the corner of the room and he just reaches in and grabs out whatever article and he's like, "Yeah, we'll use that! We'll make something funny out of that." That very much feels like my brain. I have ADHD and my brain is always rushing at a million miles an hour. The way that Touchstone thinks feels like how I think, just a heap of all these different things. It's like, "We'll try these things today! They don't match, but they'll entertain everybody."

Kat: So you feel you've created a connection with Touchstone over this process?

Christopher: I do, I love him very much. And I still have a lot of work to do. I find myself having to go back constantly to the text and ask myself, "Do I really know what I'm saying? Maybe I'm thinking about it too much. Maybe I just need to go on the ride and let it make sense of itself." So yeah, I still have some work to do, but I feel like I found a really cool philosophical take on him that's not all gags. It can be hard with clowns. Some would argue that some of the jokes are a little dated. I don't know, I think he's more of this philosophical guy that comes in and makes you think in a different way. And that's the part that's entertaining. It's really cool to discover our version of this iconic Shakespearean fool.

Kat: Do you and the other actors discuss how you're developing your character to work with each other?

Christopher: We do, yeah! It always depends on who you're working with, but this has been such an open group of people. My "squad" in the show for a long time is Touchstone, Celia, and Rosalind. So, we'll be hanging out a lot, and we'll just be like, "What are we doing at this moment?" We found a lot of things together. It's helped us enrich and deepen our backstory so we have a real group. Unique, nuanced choices come out of those discussions, like, "I wouldn't have done that if I hadn't talked to Becca [Rebecca Naomi Jones] about like, 'How do we feel about this new duke that's in the court?'" That's going to inform the way we might handle a situation. It's truly a collaboration. Anytime I'm out there and I'm feeling nervous or I'm feeling imposter syndrome, I look to my left and right and I see Rebecca Naomi Jones and Idania Quezada, and I just go, "We're here together. We're living in this new court that's very strict. I'm trying to find some humor and they're struggling with their own things." Anytime I feel afraid, I just look in their eyes and I just listen and remember, "We're all here together. We've got each other." And then I look at all those seats that are not filled yet, and I just go, "I will be in communion with all these other people who want to be entertained and who believe in and love these stories and this text as well." That's so heartening because we can just be in communion with each other.

Kat: Final question - How do you think As You Like It resonates with the Public?

Christopher: I think it resonates with the values of community. We have 127 community members in this show. And when we look at this play, Orlando, Celia, Rosalind and Touchstone go into Arden because they're being persecuted or not accepted in the court. The court is really isolating and stripped. Then we go into Arden and it's all about community. It's all about "What's mine is yours" and "Everybody belongs here. We accept all people here." I feel like those are the values that the Public has. They've certainly made me feel so seen and valued and uplifted. And I see the way that they do that in the community. It's no wonder it's been sixty years strong and ten years now with the Public Works specifically. We are truly a public theater, a theater for the public. And that's Arden! It's that utopia that we all hope to see the world become. It gives us hope seeing this community and Arden, this amazing place of wonder, mystery, and love. I'm so excited for the public to come and see this!

As You Like It runs at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park until September 11th, 2022. Free tickets can be obtained via an in-person distribution in Central Park, an in-person lottery at The Public Theater, in-person distributions in the boroughs, a digital lottery with TodayTix, or in the in-person standby line in Central Park. You can also reserve a seat by donating $300 or more to the Public, becoming a Supporter Plus.

A special thank you to Laura Mullaney and Christopher M. Ramirez from The Public Theater!