Sam Mendes by Brigitte Lacomb

Oscar and Tony winner Sam Mendes has arrived in Brooklyn with a pair of plays by the grand old bard as part of the second annual Bridge Project, a cross-Atlantic production between The West End’s Old Vic Theatre and the Brooklyn Academy of Music (his street team seems to have arrived well in advance with a gagillion slick one-sheets–featuring high contrast black and white close-up photos of the cast members–which now paper much of Manhattan as well as our local shire).  Running out in front on the boards at The Harvey Theatre is the cross-dressing cluster-truffle As You Like It, which opened January 12th, soon to be joined in double-barrel repertory by the Sturm and Drang of The Tempest.

As artistic director of the Bridge Project Mendes has selected the pieces in the pairing, he states in his manifesto, “as a single gesture, a single journey.”  He cites Ted Hughes, highlighting the recurring trope of exile, as well as finding an analogy between the wilds of the forest of Arden in the the light comedy with Devil’s Island in the later, Mediterranean-set melodrama.  And the director would also gather our attention to the journeying forth, the romantic questing, begun by the young lovers in As You Like It and left open ended by the melancholy Jaques wandering off at the end of that play–and presumably, we are to infer, brought to conclusion by Prospero’s clemency to conclude The Tempest.  This underscoring is as salient as it is deft, for the player inhabiting the two wanderer rôles, Jaques and Prospero, is the marvelous Stephen Dillane, and any director is wise to place such attention on the shiniest gem in his menagerie.

By far the biggest laughs in As You Like It come in response to Dillane’s droll Jaques.  His lassitude has a great deal more energy than many of the other performers’ zeal and the scenes he merely slinks through pop brighter than do those–even highly kinetic ones–in his absence.  Jaques gets the famous all-the-world-is-a-stage speech and not all the world’s players are created equal.  While all the musical elements are nicely arranged it is a Bob Dylan impersonation by Dillane, complete with harmonica, that positively brings the house down.

But As You Like It is a suit hung on the shoulders of young Rosalind, the exiled Duke’s daughter, also exiled herself, who in true romantic-comedy fashion resorts to cross-dressing and then must woo the man she falls for at first glance (“Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?”) with words, not, you know, charms.  Juliet Rylance’s gender-bending performance is energetic and committed and some of the half American, half British cast comes to her aid, but so much of the meta-ness and irony of the play (in Shakespeare’s time all the players were men and thus Rosalind is a man playing a woman playing a man… etcetera) is shrugged off today.  In fact the text itself would never pass a logic test from some script-doctor in a back room at Warner Brothers nowadays (why must Rosalind continue the charade when she finds her love Orlando in the netherworld of Arden, for starters).  Though, why so serious.  One imagines that Shakespeare himself–like Graham Greene, who called his lighter fare ‘entertainments’–didn’t count this one as all that heady.

And when there isn’t much for savoring with the mind, aim for the eyes.  Here is where Mendes–as in his films American Beauty and Road to Perdition–really shines.  Tom Piper’s sets are lean and as elegantly rustic as a BDDW catalog.  The lighting by Paul Bryant is nicely textural and expressive and the cast look like a bunch of chic Rang & Bone Robins of the Hood in Catherine Zuber’s modern winter costumes.  Within the wonderful peeling bohemia of The Harvey Theatre all the visual elements combine to make a sumptuous world that feels… well, a little like a garden party in Brooklyn.

As for the rest, like as much of it as please you.

As You Like It, by William Shakespeare, directed by Sam Mendes, BAM Harvey Theatre, through March 13.  bam.org