English class stages Shakespeare’s "As You Like It"

MOUNT VERNON — The Cornell College English department will stage Shakespeare’s gender-bending comedy As You Like It, directed by award-winning actress, teacher, playwright, and artistic director of the Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company Lisa Wolpe, Oct. 31 to Nov. 2 in the Plumb-Fleming Studio Theatre at Cornell.

Shows are at 8 p.m. on Oct. 31, 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. on Nov. 1, and 2 p.m. on Nov. 2. Tickets are available at the door one hour before each performance for $10 (adults) and $5 (students and seniors). Admission is free to Cornell students, faculty and staff. Tickets can be reserved by calling (763) 226-4392.

In this exciting production presented by Cornell College’s English department, Shakespeare’s tale of romance and rivalry explodes across the Wild West in an 1880 frontier town, where trigger-happy gunslingers, love-crazed cowboys, and bawdy saloon gals compete for love in a land ravaged by territorial wars.

The Cornell production is directed by Lisa Wolpe, Artistic Director of the Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company, an award-winning all-female, multi-cultural theatre company that she founded in 1993. Wolpe has performed twenty leading male roles in the Shakespeare canon, and is internationally considered a master teacher of Shakespeare. Other credits include Berkeley Repertory Theater, Shakespeare & Company, Boston Center for the Arts, Arizona Theater Company, San Diego Repertory Company, Boston Theater Works, California Shakespeare Festival, Southwest Shakespeare, Sedona Shakespeare, and various films and television shows. An accomplished playwright, she created an award-winning clown version of Parzival, an adaptation of Macbeth for three actors which just toured London and the Edinburgh Festival, and is currently working on a documentary of her company, and writing a one-woman show for herself to perform in London next summer.

This is Cornell’s biennial Shakespeare play produced by students in the course “Shakespeare after Shakespeare: Performance and Cultural Criticism,” taught by Katy Stavreva, associate professor of English. Besides staging the production, the students engage in discussions of the aesthetics and politics of performing Shakespeare in English and other world languages.

The Shakespeare production in conjunction with a course was originated in 1978 by Stephen Lacey, a 1965 graduate of Cornell who returned in 1977 as an English instructor. Following his death in 2000, the Stephen Lacey Memorial Shakespeare Fund was established to help support continuation of the production, which celebrates the love of learning, art and laughter of a beloved teacher and colleague.