[In the following review of director Ray Virta's 1999 production of As You Like It with the Kings County Shakespeare Company, Bruckner wholeheartedly applauds the ensemble cast and Virta's unequivocally comic interpretation of Shakespeare's play.]

Ray Virta, the director of the Kings County Shakespeare Company's As You Like It, takes a certain risk in making every moment of the play comedy. He lightens the early scenes—with their usurpation, envy, greed and intended fratricide—to such an extent that the love stories of the later acts lose the customary dark background against which they shine. But for him it pays off handsomely; every movement and line of this version is so well thought through that seeing it is as intellectually pleasing as it is emotionally satisfying.

Here the usurping duke who overthrows his older brother and the spiteful brother who drives his younger sibling from home are transparently foolish people whose crimes seem more absurd than threatening, and the young people joining the overthrown duke and his court in the forest of Arden seem not to be fleeing danger but rushing off to freedom. From the beginning the malice of the bad guys is inconsequential amid the capers of the fool and the wrestler at the usurper's court and the wiles of the old servant at the mean brother's house.

The point is tellingly made by Leo Bertelsen, who makes the exiled duke a lovable idler with all the elegance and temperament of an unmade bed and the bad duke a flighty hothead with a mean temper. The transformation is wonderful to watch in nearly back-to-back scenes.

The company usually presents its summer Shakespeare in Prospect Park, but this year a last-minute glitch in renovation to the park's band shell forced a move to the auditorium of St. Francis College, half a block up Remsen Street from Borough Hall in downtown Brooklyn. This play fairly cries for outdoor performance, but the company does very well on a stage not even designed for theater.

The large group of actors play like an ensemble troupe; most of them reveal a deep understanding of the complex jokes and levels of meaning in the lines, and, most important, they get the tempo and inflection of Shakespeare's language right. They even sing the songs in good harmony and so naturally that they seem, as they should, part of the dialogue.

Missy Thomas is a deceptively effective Rosalind, a bit capricious and not altogether likable at the outset. But she is so shaken by her own feelings at the end when, disguised as a boy, she finds she really loves the man she's been teasing with rejection, that one can feel her pain through the laughter. Vincent Barrett as Orlando is the emblem of all of love's fools; pinning the champion wrestler, tacking love poems to trees and standing startled and speechless when the boy becomes Rosalind in a wedding gown, he always seems just over the edge. And the eyes and smiles of Julie Dingman, as Celia, reveal all the ambiguities in the verbal sparring of Orlando and the disguised Rosalind that the audience might not have thought of.

Donald Bledsoe as Touchstone and Katharine Houston as the coarsely wise Audrey provide sharp reminders of why actors tend to think these are the best comic characters in the English language. Robin Post as Phebe, protesting she is not in love with the boy who is really Rosalind, can make your heart ache, and Frank Smith as Silvius, who is pursuing Phebe, really doesn't need words—his face is a perfect composition of longing and of suffering hope. But the best inspiration here is the casting of Jon Fordham as Jaques; he is a formidable presence and he takes the role of the philosopher of melancholy very seriously indeed, making the character exquisitely funny. For once his parting shot—“I am for other than for dancing measures”—sounds like the perfect period to a comedy that still sounds perfect 400 years after its first production.

Some year, if the city ever finishes its lingering renovation of the stage at the Prospect Park band shell, this company should assemble the same cast with the same director and repeat this presentation; it has the warmth and comfort of a summer evening.