As You Like It - Director's Note

August, 2004. We are walking in Ireland. The road is ancient. It was once the main road from Cork to Killarney. Thankfully, it was bypassed eight years ago. What was once a busy thoroughfare is now blissfully quiet. We will not see a single car on our mile jaunt. My companion is five years old. She is my first cousin’s granddaughter. I used to walk this road with my father. This year I have been unable to make his prompt 8:00AM start. So I walk instead with Leona.

There are many remarkable things about my walking with Leona. Last summer and the summer before, she would cry and run away from me. The family insisted that her strangeness had nothing to do with me. The sting of rejection swelled into mutual animosity. I began to resent her daily presence at my father’s house as much as she resented mine.

But that was before. Some things just take time. Relationships, even between a five year old and her adult first cousin twice-removed, must be allowed to ripen at their own pace. Now I am her favorite playmate. She follows me around the house and acreage. We have a pattern of activities to fill the days. This walk is one of them. And the best.

She walks briskly on strong little legs. The conversation bubbles out of her as she narrates our walk. We are not alone. Three dogs trot ahead, beside, and behind us. We are an industrious crew making good time on our journey.

The weather has been ‘showery’ for two weeks. I ask Leona, “Will it rain today?” “I don’t know,” she replies, “Maybe. Maybe not.” She reminds me of Corin in As You Like It. Her thoughts are seemingly simple. And wise. We pass green fields of newly shorn sheep, again I think of As You Like It.

I am in the forest of Arden, sort of. I am certainly away from the bustle of City/Court life. What a difference from my daily experience in Seattle where I multi-task myself into a frenzy at the sacrifice of my short-term memory. Here in my Irish Arden my sole purpose is to rest, think, enjoy, relax, ponder, and simply be. I may not be escaping a persecution like Duke Senior, Rosalind, or Orlando in As You Like It. But, I am in a sanctuary.

Shakespeare’s Arden has its philosophers and its secrets. We know that once you enter the forest, you will never be the same. There is no clock in this forest. Time is held at a standstill as characters collide and find their true selves. Each character in this play has a revelation, a conversion, or an epiphany, and they each discover a true path to their own fulfillment.

I think I understand the mystery of Arden as Leona and I circle around the graveyard where generations of our ancestors rest around the Cromwellian ruins of a stone church.

All religions have a wilderness experience: a place to be quiet and receive grace. The desert, the mountains, a cave. Shakespeare uses Arden. I feel the same mystical forces in the Killaha graveyard. I touch infinity as I walk along the uncut grass to say hello to my grandparents’ grave with their great, great granddaughter’s hand gently clasped in mine.

And I am being.

– Stephanie Shine

 

Photo Credits: Leona Buckley, Stephanie Shine, and Paige the Westie •
Photo by Connor Shine