Freehold's Engaged Theatre Program Presents AS YOU LIKE IT

Freehold's Engaged Theatre, unique in our region, tours again this summer with a new Shakespeare production. Director Robin Lynn Smith and a seasoned company of actors including Sunam Ellis (Rosalind), Sylvester F. Kamara (Jaques), Meg McLynn (Phoebe) Evan Barrett (Orlando) and Wilysha Walton (Celia) bring AS YOU LIKE IT to stirring life with live music composed by Kultur Shock member Srdjan "Gino" Yevdjevich and movement by Butoh dancer Vanessa Skantze.

For over 15 years Engaged Theatre has connected with audiences from some of the Northwest's most extraordinary audiences. This year they will reach over 500 inmates and incarcerated youth from Washington Correctional Center for Women, Monroe Correctional Complex and Echo Glen Children's Center as well as patients in Harborview's Psychiatric Unit. Additionally, Freehold's core value of radical accessibility means no barriers to attending so all public performances are pay what you can. Seats can be reserved through brownpapertickets.com or by calling (800) 838-3006.

Smith's telling of AS YOU LIKE IT is a story about exile: individual and communal, self imposed or coercive; and the possibility of using the time away to come to terms with the world and people left behind, and discover a new self. The forest of Arden offers a space where what is more true to nature -earthly and human - can emerge. A stay in the forest offers the opportunity to perceive an altered balance between human beings and the natural world, and the seed of a subversive, communal state of being against the emerging individualistic state.

Director Robin Lynn Smith shared, "The plays demand everything we can bring, every time, to put the living, breathing story up there - so that the audience can connect to these extraordinary circumstances fully embodied by the actors." Freehold's Engaged Theatre productions are intentionally dynamic and diverse so that any human can see a reflection of some part of themselves - in the story, the characters, the music or movement.