[In the following review, Henning praises director David H. Bell's 2001 Chicago Shakespeare Theater staging of As You Like It, particularly its czarist setting and nearly impeccable individual performances.]

Like the last quarter of our annus horribilus 2001, As You Like It (through March 9 at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater) begins darkly. We're in a chaotic world where the natural order of things has gone completely wrong. Duke Senior has been usurped and banished to the Forest of Arden by his brother, Duke Frederick. Orlando is threatened by his brother, Oliver, and after defeating Charles, Duke Frederick's savage wrestler, hightails it to the same wilderness. The evil Duke also gives the bum's rush to Rosalind, best friends with his daughter, Celia. In masculine disguise, Rosalind leaves for the Forest of Arden with Celia, along with Touchstone, the court jester.

Once everybody interesting has been pushed off to Arden, Shakespeare has enormous fun teaching us that pastoral sentiment is as phony as anything the cynical urban court offers. The city folks and the rustics pursue one another through the woods in the Elizabethan equivalent of a terrific road movie. We get dreamy illusions from the old Duke (“Are not these woods more free from peril than the envious court?”), hard-nosed realism from Rosalind (“Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love”), and dyspeptic gloominess from Jaques (“I can suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs”). We learn that city folk are pretty much indistinguishable from shepherds, and that both the city and the country are home to decent women and men who live and love, smile and sing, connect with one another and make their lives together.

The ultimate lesson is that life takes on meaning from the spirit of adventure that we bring to it. Thus, the only loser as the play ends is the detached and sour Jaques. Rosalind chides him for merely observing: “Then to have seen much, and to have nothing, is to have rich eyes and poor hands.” What makes As You Like It a wonderful work of art is that extravagantly different people thrown together in crisis bravely form a new and better community. Much the same lesson that my Brooklynite daughter, after overcoming her post-Sept. 11 anti-urban panic, has taken from her experience of the last few months in New York.

With a play as good as this one, all the director has to do is not screw it up. Rather than try to embrace all of this wonderful stuff in an elaborate production, a timid person will dress proficient actors in black, set them on a bare stage with a couple of trees and chairs for props and get out of the way. Not so with director David H. Bell, who has translated his unique but lucid vision of the play into an elaborate and enormously successful creation. I don't remember getting as much visual and aural pleasure from any other Shakespeare production on stage.

For starters, this As You Like It is set in 19th-century imperial Russia, with snow falling on a frosty Arden (abstractly but engagingly designed by James Leonard Joy and lit dramatically by Howard Werner), and courtiers dressed in stunning gold and brocade tunics and gowns (by Mariann Verheyen). The play is filled with sweet songs, here set to equally agreeable Russian melodies (by composer Henry Marsh) sung by excellent singers backed by a strong male chorus. Mr. Bell intelligently cuts and pastes quite a bit. He makes much of an incidental deer-hunting scene, parading what looked to me like a real carcass across the stage to underline the reality that “the exiled gentlemen are tyrants to the deer even as their usurpers are to them.”

Once we are out of the first scene, where Mark L. Montgomery is no more successful at playing the usurper Oliver, Orlando's evil brother, than Ben Stiller was at playing the cynical brother in The Royal Tenenbaums, the performances are uniformly worthy of this grand production. Timothy Gregory is convincing as the decent, unfairly put-upon Orlando. When he flamboyantly takes off his shirt to wrestle Charles, it's clear that Rosalind loves him for more than his mind. Rosalind, perhaps the best role ever written for a woman, is played by Elizabeth Laidlaw, a fine actress built right for this role, in which she mainly impersonates a man. Tall and lovely as a woman, Ms. Laidlaw is also raw-boned and lanky enough to succeed at her manly masquerade. Kate Fry, as Celia, is more than merely Rosalind's sidekick. Greg Vinkler, a fine Shakespearean actor, provides a nice balance of dark and light touches to Jaques, and Saxon Palmer is consistently fine and funny as Touchstone, the noble fool.