West Linn High School Performing Arts Dept.

As You Like It

Set and Lighting Design by Jon Ares.

March 2006.

By William Shakespeare. Directed by Jessica Middleton Murray, Costume Design by Cheryl Cantwell.

As we were still without our own theatre spaces for a few more months, we performed this production at Portland Community College’s intimate “Little Theatre.”

The concept was thus: the Duke’s ‘court’ was “The Court” – a gated upper-middle class housing development in 1950’s Southern California. To showcase this, I did four ‘brochures’ advertising the stock floor plans and available amenities in this “exclusive” development. In contrast, “The Forest of Arden” was a counterculture (‘beatnik’) coffee house in San Francisco – culturally about as far as you could get from middle class Southern California. The screens were reversed, and had collage-like imagery from beatnik artists of the time, plus slightly hallucinogenic photo imagery of the area.