AS YOU LIKE IT to Open as Pride Production at Marin Shakespeare Company

Marin Shakespeare Company will present "As You Like It," adapted and directed by Evren Odcikin and running June 19 through July 19 at the Forest Meadows Amphitheatre. A dazzling, music-filled, fashion-forward romp through the Forest of Arden. Joyous and romantic, this reimagining leans into the comedy's delicious fluidity of gender and identity. Join the celebration of love, out loud, in all its forms.

Odcikin's vibrant production opens during Pride Month and invites audiences into one of Shakespeare's most playful explorations of love and desire. In Odcikin's vision, Arden is not simply a place of exile or escape. It is a world where people find the language, the community, and the courage to say who they are out loud.

The production draws a vivid contrast between the polished danger of the court and the liberated world of Arden. The court is sleek, status-obsessed, and tightly controlled; Arden is colorful, communal, musical, and alive - inspired less by a traditional pastoral fantasy than by the backyard of a queer Bay Area gathering place where "weirdos and outsiders can breathe." With high fashion, music, movement, and the expansive beauty of MSC's outdoor summer amphitheatre, this "As You Like It" trades the usual forest fantasy for something stranger, sharper, and more celebratory.

The production also brings two extraordinary guest artists to Marin Shakespeare Company's summer stage. Lady Zen, appearing as Amiens and serving as composer and music director, is a Fulbright mezzo, poet, librettist, actor, and genre-defying entertainment artist whose Lyric Fusion Poetics blends opera, jazz, photography, and spoken word. Based in Mexico, she has toured and taught across Central America and Europe, and previously composed music for MSC's "Hamlet."

Lisa Wolpe, appearing as Jacques, is one of the world's great Shakespeare artists: a performer, director, educator, and founder of the all-female, multicultural Los Angeles Women's Shakespeare Company. She has performed and directed at major Shakespeare companies across the world, and her acclaimed solo work "Shakespeare and the Alchemy of Gender" has toured internationally - making her presence especially electric in this gender-fluid reimagining.

The cast also features two acclaimed Bay Area performers at the heart of Shakespeare's great comedy: Jeunée Simon as Rosalind and Adam Magill as Orlando. They are joined by Stevie DeMott as Olivia, Dave Maier as Charles/Oliver Martext, Fatemeh Mehraban as Celia, Cathleen Riddley as Adam/Duke Senior, David Sinaiko as Touchstone, and Chris Steele as Le Beau/Audrey.

At the center of the story are Rosalind and Orlando, two outsiders who recognize something true in one another before the rest of the world catches up. Around them, Shakespeare's beloved comedy unfolds with mistaken identities, romantic confusion, sharp wit, music, movement, and a joyful collision of hearts. In Odcikin's adaptation, the ending becomes not simply a set of marriages, but a communal celebration of love in its many forms.

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