One of playwright William Shakespeare’s most famous lines comes from “As You Like It” being: “‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”

Eighteen Waterford Upper School student-actors and five stage management crew students will present Shakespeare’s well-known play at 7 p.m., Nov. 15 and Nov. 16 as well as at 3 p.m., Nov. 16 in their black box theatre, 1480 E. 9400 South. Tickets are free, but they need to be reserved with Waterford’s front desk prior to the show because of
limited seating.

Additional students, who are part of the school’s costume club and help prepare costumes, contribute to the program as well as those students who are assisting the show’s technical director, Lee Wright, with building and painting sets. 

“This play is a really great fit for my students,” director Javen Tanner said. “The past two years, we’ve performed tragedies with ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ and ‘King Lear.’ Before that, we did ‘Henry IV, Part 1,’ so a history. ‘As You Like It’ is a very different play; it’s a fun, hilarious Shakespeare comedy and one I haven’t directed before so I’m excited
to do it.”

Comedies, he said, are every bit as complex as tragedies.

“It’s fun to create these funny moments with them and to see the audience enjoying it and laughing. I’m excited for my students to have that experience, for them to have that real special thing that happened in a good comedy,” he said.

Tanner said the whole play is “a pastoral play” set in the ancient Greek countryside and actors will wear “those lovely
Grecian costumes.” 

“The script, the story itself, looks to Shakespeare’s romances, the plays he wrote at the end of his career, but this is not a romance. It does have this element where we go to the woods to figure things out and it ends with the goddess of marriage appearing. I want to really play around with the philosophical idea that we go to the woods to work out our problems, which is a theme all through Shakespeare’s plays,” he said.

Tanner said not everyone realizes “Shakespeare as the greatest writer ever, the guy who wrote the greatest tragedies, is also the guy who wrote the silliest comedies ever, which is really a fascinating thing; the more you dig in, the more you realize how connected those things are. He knew exactly what he was doing, but the silliness of his comedies, that’s his style. You really know that a director understands Shakespeare’s comedy if they’re very funny and very silly and very over the top. That’s how Shakespeare wrote,” said Tanner, who said he’s “spent my whole life in Shakespeare’s plays. I’ve read his plays multiple times, and I’ve directed more than 20 of his plays” in addition to acting in many.

Tanner read his first play in high school.

“A friend had this old copy of ‘Macbeth,’ and she gave it to me, and I read that, and I didn’t understand all of it, but I found some moments where I was like, ‘Oh, wow, this is really cool,’” he said. “That’s where it
ignited for me.”

It was acting in Shakespearean plays in college where he began to understand the playwright’s words.

“If you have a good teacher, they can really light a fire and help you see what Shakespeare is. Sometimes, English and humanities teachers, and even theatre teachers really don’t get it. But when you’re in that Shakespeare play you start to see it for what it is, because you’re inside it,” Tanner said. “That was in college for me and that’s where I just started to realize, ‘this is really incredible.’ That’s the thing I care about is for our students to have that experience and see how profound it is, how fun it is.”

Shakespeare’s words also had an impact on about 30 sixth through eighth graders in early October when they performed, “Comedy of Errors,” under the direction of Riya Sahasrabudhe.

“They’re beginning to learn about his words and how silly his comedies are,” he said. “They (were) having great fun with sword fighting with rubber chickens.”

Following Shakespeare, Upper School students are invited to be in the Dec. 20-21 show, “This Bird of Dawning,” the Christmas story told through music, poetry, and mask, produced by The Sting and Honey Company downtown.

“I usually use former and current Waterford students because the kind of mask work it involves is mask work I teach here at Waterford,” Tanner said, who is the artistic director for the company. “The masks are called blank masks, those white blank masks, and I teach my movement classes the technique behind blank mask. It’s a mask of projection. When you’re wearing this blank mask, you tell a story with your body and what you put in your physicality, the audience will project onto the mask. When you commit physically to something like anger or rage or sadness or joy, the audience will start projecting that onto the mask, and they’ll think they see it on the mask. In this piece, we tell the story of the nativity, however nobody speaks. It’s all done through movement. It’s beautiful.”

A spring show has yet to be named. λ