Contact:
Eric Sloss
412-268-5765

For immediate release:
April 3, 2006

Carnegie Mellon's School of Drama To Perform Shakespeare's Classic Comedy "As You Like It"

"As You Like It" features students (l-r) Ashton Heyl, Chris Henry and Paloma Guzman. (Photograph by Josh Franzos.)

PITTSBURGH—Elizabeth Bradley, head of Carnegie Mellon University's School of Drama, announces the production of Shakespeare's "As You Like It," April 27 through May 6 at Carnegie Mellon's Philip Chosky Theater. Di Trevis will guest-direct the production. Tickets are $22-$25 with discounts for students, seniors and Carnegie Mellon faculty and staff.

"'As You Like It,' one of Shakespeare's great comedies, is also a fascinating meditation on gender identity and power," said Bradley. "The School of Drama is delighted to welcome back guest director Trevis to create her first production of Shakespeare for the school. We look forward to sharing this beguiling and bittersweet work with our audiences to close an exceptionally strong season in the School of Drama."

Shakespeare sets this play in the Forest of Arden, which is protected from explorers and untarnished by cartographers. "As You Like It" follows the merry adventures of Rosalind, a beloved optimist, and her quest for true love amid the schemes of two warring brothers. Rosalind travels across the lines between town and country, youth and age, the romantic and the realistic, laughter and sorrow, fortune and fate, and virtue and vice.

"You will notice that most of the central part of 'As You Like It' consists of often-random encounters between different characters in the forest," said Shakespeare scholar Ian Johnston, University College Professor of Malaspina University-College. "In many cases, they have no particular reason to talk to each other. What these serve to bring out is a series of conversations about life (and particularly about love) in which we witness different attitudes clashing. The effect is to take us through a variety of responses to shared concerns and to get us responding to our own sense of the appropriate ways to deal with experience."

Born in Birmingham, England, Trevis was educated at Waverley Grammar School and the University of Sussex, where she studied social anthropology. She worked for several years as an actress, first at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow and the National Theatre before becoming a director in 1981. She has worked extensively at the Royal Shakespeare Company, where her productions have included Brecht's "Happy End," "The Taming of the Shrew," "Revenger's Tragedy," "Much Ado About Nothing" and Elgar's "Rondo."

At the Royal National Theatre (RNT), where she was the first woman to run a company, her productions have included plays by Shakespeare, Moliere, Lorca and Brecht. She compiled and directed the RNT's tribute to Brecht, "Happy Birthday Brecht," which she has subsequently staged in the U.S. to fund the charity Pianos to Havana. Recent work includes the revival of Birtwistle's opera "Gawain," which formed part of the opening season of the new Covent Garden Opera House; "Death of a Salesman" at the Birmingham Rep; and "Remembrance of Things Past," which enjoyed a sell-out season at the National Theatre and was also staged in Australia.

The School of Drama is one of the nation's most distinguished degree-granting theatre programs and is one of five schools within Carnegie Mellon's College of Fine Arts, a community of nationally and internationally recognized artists and professionals organized into Architecture, Art, Design, Drama and Music, and their associated centers and programs.

For additional information and to purchase tickets, contact the School of Drama box office at 412-268-2407, noon to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday. For more information on the School of Drama or the College of Fine Arts, visit www.cmu.edu/cfa or contact Eric Sloss at 412-268-5765 or ecs@andrew.cmu.edu.