ABSTRACT
In the fall of 1991 Declan Donnellan’s London Cheek By Jowl Theatre Company produced As You Like It with an all-male cast. Hailed by some as a bold experiment, others as a misguided disappointment, and still others as insensitive to the politics of theater employment (always more actresses are “resting” and out of work than actors), the production echoed a similar London undertaking more than twenty years earlier. In 1967 the National Theatre produced an all-male As You Like It. Why this apparent longing for a theater convention long dead? Do such experiments attempt to capture-however ephemerally-a Shakespearean authenticity, a sense of how it really was back then, during one of the so-called “golden ages” of theater?
