E-Mail This Article to a Friend Girls’ nights out As You Like It and Lettice and Lovage at Shakespeare & Company BY CAROLYN CLAY
	As You Like It By William Shakespeare. Directed by Eleanor Holdridge. Set by Kris Stone. Lighting by Lap-Chi Chu. Costumes by Jacqueline Firkins. Music and sound by Scott Killian. Choreography by Susan Dibble. Fight choreography by Michael Burnet. Music direction by Linda Dondell. With Michael Milligan, Dennis Krausnick, Jason Asprey, Mel Cobb, Dan McCleary, Sarah Rafferty, Anne Gottlieb, Kevin G. Coleman, Tony Molina, Martin Bonger, James Robert Daniels, Zachary Green, Nevin Kumar, Susannah Millonzi, Jonathan Epstein, and Ariel Bock. In the Founders’ Theatre at Shakespeare & Company, in repertory through August 29. Lettice and Lovage By Peter Shaffer. Directed by Eleanor Holdridge. Set by Bob and Govane Lohbauer. Costumes by Govane Lohbauer. Lighting by Nathan Towne-Smith. Sound by Jason Fitzgerald. With Tina Packer, Diane Prusha, Catherine Taylor-Williams, and Andrew Borthwick-Leslie. In the Spring Lawn Theatre at Shakespeare & Company, in repertory through September 5.

LENOX — "All the world’s a stage" in both playing spaces at Shakespeare & Company this season, where the Bard’s As You Like It, from which the famous phrase emanates, and Peter Shaffer’s Lettice and Lovage, a paean to imagination gussied up as pure theatrics, hold sway. And despite the gender of the playwrights, it’s less a man’s word than a woman’s that’s on display in these two productions, which feature outstanding performances by females both familiar and not. This seems fitting given that the 26-year-old company in the Berkshires is the vision of larger-than-life Tina Packer, who this summer is fitting her brimming contours to those of larger-than-life Lettice Douffet, the Life Force of Shaffer’s 1987 play, which here is packed into the tiny Spring Lawn Theatre like a two-pound steak on a salad plate. In the larger Founders’ Theatre, the Bard’s cavalcade of love set in the Forest of Arden sits like a just-right-sized dessert that morphs, as the play moves from brutal court to wintry wood, from dark to white chocolate.

By no fault of its own, the Shakespeare & Company As You Like It follows by just eight months Sir Peter Hall’s Theatre Royal Bath production, which played last fall at Boston’s Wilbur Theatre. Of lighter weight, this one is like a palliative to the exquisite ache of that staging, its Rosalind (the charming Sarah Rafferty) more playful and less interesting than the giddy, gangly sufferer of Rebecca Hall, who was "fathom deep" in love and drowning in the contradictory emotions such a plunge entails. Director Eleanor Holdridge (this year’s skipper while Packer crews, she also helms Lettice and Lovage) conceives the play as a study of opposites that, freed to find their centers, meld. The stage floor sports a pattern of black and white diamonds (echoed in Touchstone’s motley), and the mostly Johnny Tremain–vintage costumes (complete with three-cornered hats) move from black at court to white in the forest — though Holdridge seems to aim here for metaphoric innocence rather than an evocation of the "icy fang" of winter or the not-so-sweet uses of adversity. She sees Rosalind, exiled from her evil uncle’s court, and Orlando, fleeing an unnatural older brother, as Adam and Eve, cast into rather than out of Eden, there to ripen along with the weather.

There is also a whimsical feel to this As You Like It, with the escaping Orlando and faithful old servant Adam hopping into a fishing hole like Alice into the rabbit’s, only to climb up, blanched, into the Forest, with its lacy ice and white leaves (little scrolls for Orlando’s doggerel) and vividly hued cyc. As is usually the case at Shakespeare & Company, the production is glisteningly clear and well spoken, if not revelatory. The play’s inherent magic is adhered to, right down to the quadruple-wedding appearance of a conjured Hymen to perform the rites, and the spell is abetted by Scott Killian’s score, a rich mélange of melancholy and romance, of plucked strings and piano glissandi and tinkling bells, that’s more than just incidental music. And Holdridge emphasizes the gender confusion in the forest, where ambient passion, surprising even its perpetrators, gets so giddy that Orlando lands a long full-out kiss on Ganymede’s lips and Touchstone, reunited with the exiled Duke, smooches him similarly.

S&C stalwart Jonathan Epstein, a more rueful and contemplative than bitter Jaques, brings an ingratiating sadness to his little jokes. And newcomer Michael Milligan, for the most part a tender, even moony Orlando, mixes a bit of Kate-and-Petruchio physicality into his dealings with Rosalind. As the two dukes, James Robert Daniels is more effective as the fascist Frederick than as the humanistic Duke Senior, whom he renders colorless. But with Dennis Krausnick a touchingly dazed Adam, Kevin G. Coleman a bemused Touchstone, and Jason Asprey both a quietly malevolent Oliver and a Corin who’s more leathery old redneck than philosophizing rustic, it’s the women who turn in the sparkier performances.