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I’m tempted to start putting a “Ye Olde” before the name of the Drilling Company Theater when I see one of their Shakespeare in the Parking Lot productions. The company has been mounting these scrappy outdoor stagings for decades. They’re always a solid dose of real Shakespeare and a good time. Iffy weather (now including fouled air from wildfire smoke), street noise, and less-than-inviting surroundings don’t stop Hamilton Clancy’s players from turning a corner of the parking lot by Lower East Side Prep in Manhattan’s Lower East Side into palaces, gardens, and in the case of As You Like It, Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden. For the Drilling Company, all the world is a stage.
Sparrows chirped in an adjacent tree, sirens wailed down Essex St., and Friday night partiers whooped obliviously on the other side of the fence as a cast led by several excellent actors conjured up Shakespeare’s classic comedy of cross-dressing, clowning, family dysfunction, and whimsical philosophy.
The leads shine in a few different ways. Patrick Hart as Orlando slides easily between a declamatory style and a more naturalistic one as different scenes call for. He delivers crushing pathos as the lost young man shooed away from Duke Frederick’s court by his mean older brother Oliver (a magnetically showboating Emmanuel Elpenord). Lia Bonfilio portrays Rosalind as brilliantly as the Bard could have asked for, sliding from playful and giggly with her dear cousin Celia (a vivacious Thammie Laine Quách), to suddenly enamored, to razor-edged woodland wit.
Bonfilio and Hart are brightly touching and funny in the tongue-tied love-at-first-sight encounter between the story’s two main lovers. Rosalind then spends the better part of the play disguised as the youth Ganymede, complete with a mustache perhaps inspired by the (I presume) real whiskers of Raphael del Rio, who drolly plays the wrestler Charles and several other small roles. Antic and eloquent throughout her turn as “Ganymede,” Bonfilio captures the kind of elevated reality that only lives in a fantastical story like this. Brava.
Andy Rowell brings his wonted broad, intelligent clowning to the role of Touchstone, as he did as Feste in Twelfth Night during the 2024 season and as Puck last year. Chris Martel switches without undue exaggeration between the resentful and jealous usurper Duke Frederick and his banished, kindhearted brother, Duke Senior. Carly Grissom is broadly funny in multiple roles, including a portrayal of Audrey as a gum-chewing moll. Lizabeth Allen has a strong, intense turn as the shepherdess Phoebe. and Adama Joy Sall has several shining scenes singing the play’s numerous songs, including two for which she composed the music. All the tunes are good, with Sall’s “Hymen’s Song” at the end especially catchy.
The production adds an extra song, having Orlando sing his poem “Hang there, my verse, in witness of my love.” Even more effective is a scene where a sort of astral version of Orlando walks unobserved behind Rosalind reciting for us the poem on the paper she holds.
I was less taken with Dave Marantz’s Jacques. On the one hand, he brings gravitas to the melancholy character. On the other, he overdoes the portentousness in important passages like the “All the world’s a stage” speech, which here seems to erupt out of a different play or production. In a way, that does align with the character’s discomfort in the world he finds himself in, crying over a dead deer, interrupting the multiple-nuptial celebrations at the close to announce he’s leaving the assembled celebrants for a different kind of life. But a more sympathetic portrayal would have made the contrast more effective.
Quibbles aside, these Drilling Company productions get closer to what feels like authentic Shakespeare than many larger and more polished stagings do. Real Shakespeare, and what feels like a party. As You Like It runs Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays through August 1, 2026, subject – unlike Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden, which has remained untouched by wildfires for well over 400 years – to the vagaries of climate. Tickets are free, but dropping “a ducat in the bucket” is encouraged. Details are at the Drilling Company website.
