Romantic love is real. We act as though it’s not, as if it were some otherworldly madness that strikes us like a disease and has no relation to our everyday selves. We delude ourselves not by giving in to romance, but by allowing ourselves to believe it is something other than what we have ourselves discovered it to be.
As You Like It presents us with a whole batch of lovers whose conceptions of love and romance cover the spectrum from the mooning, wailing, out of control romantic to the hardened cynic who won’t allow himself to be affected by it. But sitting squarely in the center of this play is the character of Rosalind, the balanced realist who also happens to be madly in love. She falls as hard as any one ever has, but at the same time is a person of the same world you and I recognize, and is unwilling to degrade herself for love or to deny it in order to control it. It is a real part of her real life, and she deals with it accordingly. She brings order to the universe of love. Reality in love and reality in life are the same thing, and awareness of this is Rosalind’s gift to us all.

Lance Channing

Lisa Viertel

Ilene Fins

Bunny Seagraves