Still in Love, Paltrow Sparkles in Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The waitress in the restaurant Saturday just outside Williamstown understood the moment we said we were in a hurry. “You’re going to see Gwynie,” she said. “The whole town’s abuzz.”

We were indeed going to see Gwynie: Oscar winner Gwyneth Paltrow, to those who haven’t watched her grow up in this Berkshires college town, where she and her mom, Blythe Danner, have been summertime regulars. Now, Gwynie is back on the stage at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, where she’d first appeared in 1981 in an epic compilation of tragedies called “The Greeks.”

Can’t say that this critic was astute enough back then to pick out the blond child and say, “She’s gonna be a star.” But if you must know, yes, the luminous girl-boy-girl of “Shakespeare in Love” is just as luminous a girl-boy-girl in “As You Like It.”

If Rosalind were not one of the most cherished of Shakespearean heroines, it might seem more than a little peculiar to find Paltrow once again disguising herself in male attire. But where “Shakespeare in Love’s” Viola embarked on her adventure as a lark, Rosalind has a darker reason for resorting to boy’s clothing. The daughter of an exiled duke, she has been summarily thrust out of the court where she had found protection to make her own way in the world.

She is, happily, not alone: Her cousin Celia, played by the winning Megan Dodds, insists on accompanying Rosalind to the Forest of Arden, where, posing as brother and sister, they set themselves up as shepherds. Also inhabiting this busy forest are Rosalind’s cheerful father, well played by Byron Jennings, and his band of loyal followers; the jester Touchstone, acted with welcome restraint by Mark Linn-Baker, who has followed Rosalind and Celia from the court; and an assortment of lovesick rustics, headed by Lea DeLaria as Phoebe. Most important, Rosalind’s beloved Orlando, in the ingratiating person of Alessandro Nivola, also has found his way into the forest, to carve Rosalind’s name into the uncomplaining trees and decorate the shrubbery with sheets of love poetry.

With its famously brief rehearsal period, Williamstown is not the place you’d expect to see actors, however talented, forged into a brilliant Shakespearean company. But under the direction of Barry Edelstein, they pull off a small miracle, speaking Shakespeare’s intricate language as if it were their daily form of address and conveying the narrative clearly and comprehensibly.

Paltrow, whether flitting around girlishly in Rosalind’s blazingly red strapless ballgown, or striding boyishly through the woods in Ganymede’s tweedy knickers, is a striking physical presence on the stage. Although her voice doesn’t project quite as well as it ought, she dominates every scene in which she appears, bantering with Celia, teasing Orlando and, in drag, promising to make everything end happily by magically producing Rosalind.

“As You Like It” is usually seen as one of Shakespeare’s merriest works, with only the melancholy Lord Jaques to darken the mood created by the spirited lovers and penitent villains. Jaques is an example of the Renaissance belief in the humors governing human personality, and his self-imposed melancholia strikes us today as neither humorous nor insightful. Actors have no more idea what to make of him than do audiences. He’s usually played either for laughs or for pathos, neither very successfully. But Michael Cumpsty, that supple, always reliable classical actor, brings him to life here with a vivid, impassioned performance that allows audiences both to smile and to take him seriously at the same time. With a swooping, supercilious “I can suck melancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs,” Cumpsty establishes Jaques as the smartest character in the play, Shakespeare’s nod to reason amid all the romantic folderol.

Edelstein has, for the most part, gone with the play’s lighthearted tone. He’s gotten a fizzy jazz treatment from composer Mark Bennett for the play’s songs, performed with sweetness by Keith Byron Kirk. Anita Yavich has designed costumes that for the most part look like they could have been worn in an English great house in the ‘30s: tail coats and evening gowns for the court, Norfolk jackets and white garden-party dresses for the woods. But the shepherds have been dressed like characters in “The Flintstones” and directed with even less subtlety. The men manage to retain their dignity, but the overly broad performances of DeLaria and Angelina Phillips seriously undercut the production.

The other miscalculation is Narelle Sissons’ set design, which promises a quirky minimalism in the opening tableau of apple cartons and ladder. But as the play progresses, the symbolic images pile up faster than the conceits in Touchstone’s speeches, too clever by half and underlined by frames within frames that seem to put the whole play in quotation marks. When the acting is this crisp, it can speak for itself.

* “As You Like It” continues through Sunday at Adams Memorial Theatre, 1000 Main St., Williamstown, Mass. (413) 597-3400.