"I'm glad I am getting another crack at playing Rosalind," says former Princeton native Jennifer Van Dyck, who heads the cast of As You Like It, the season opener at the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival. With a growing repertoire of the Bard's heroines under her belt, including Portia (The Merchant of Venice) at the Bread Loaf Theater, Cordelia (King Lear) and Ophelia (Hamlet) at the Old Globe, Van Dyck, however, recalls the "joyous" comedy" as her first experience performing Shakespeare. This was at Brown University where Van Dyck, class of 86, had a double major in religion and theater. She says she is still in awe of Rosalind's "ability to think so incredibly on her feet, let alone pulling off her disguise as a man."
Of course, we agree that gender switching is a theatrical device actors have been using since and most likely before Shakespeare's time. I don't know what possessed me to ask Van Dyck if she ever disguised herself or pre tended to be someone she is not to make someone fall in love with her, like Rosalind in the play. But she does reveal how she met her actor husband Jonathan Walker. They were both in disguise playing an incestuous brother and sister in Jack O'Brien's staging of Hamlet (Campbell Scott in the title role), at the Old Globe. It's nice to know that "Ophelia" and "Laertes," after a nine-year courtship, have just this week celebrated their first wedding anniversary. While Van Dyck trods the boards in Madison, Walker is acting across the river in a new play, Angelique, at the Manhattan Class Company.
This production of As You Like It marks Van Dyck's debut with the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival, but the actor is no stranger to the Festival's artistic director Bonnie J. Monte. What they have in common is the Williamstown Theatre Festival, where Monte worked as an associate to Williamstown's late artistic director Nikos Psacharopoulos. It was during her college years that Van Dyck began as an apprentice there and graduated to Williamstown's non-Equity and finally Equity company.
While we are in agreement that Rosalind is, indeed, the most attractive and most intelligent of the play's characters, Van Dyck says she is more intrigued with Rosalind's guts and her ability to poke fun at others as well as herself. "I'd like to think I have that ability myself. As an actor you have to learn to laugh at your ability and sometimes your inability to do something. There's a certain kind of bravery that comes with putting on a costume or a mask," says Van Dyck, as she summons up Rosalind's first line, "I show more mirth than I am mistress of." Apparently one of the reasons Van Dyck claims she admires Rosalind is because of the way "she launches herself out a lonely life into a vivacious adventuresome person." One might suspect that it is also many an actor's dream.
If ingenuity and cleverness are a major part of Rosalind's character, these are qualities that are also expected of an actor, especially today. There certainly appears to be parallels drawn between Van Dyck and Rosalind. As an actor who has been fortunate to keep working at her profession since graduation from college, Van Dyck gives herself credit for her "stick-to-itiveness," a quality she says an actor needs. "With doors slamming in your face every day, and people telling you are the wrong size and shape, you have to be stubborn and determined. Van Dyck, who sees her career as a calling, says she advises people who ask: "If there is anything else you want to do, do it."
I don't get the expected response from Van Dyck when I ask her if she had a tough time getting started. Van Dyck relates what she remembers as "a sort of magical beginning. Upon the advice of her voice teacher, Van Dyck met the powers-that-be at Trinity Rep. Van Dyck had already gone to usher there when she was in school. After a Trinity Rep associate saw Van Dyck in a production at Brown, she would be cast in The Crucible to be directed by Psacharopoulos. Van Dyck would spend more than a year performing at Trinity Rep.
Lucky enough to begin her professional career at the renowned Trinity Rep, Van Dyck remembers saying to actor and former Trinity Rep artistic director Richard Jenkins that "my real dream was to be a theatre actor who also did film." She remembers him laughing and saying, "Are you crazy? You think that's a new idea? That's what everyone wants." Some of Van Dyck's notable roles at Trinity Rep include Abigail in The Crucible, Lavinia in Mourning Becomes Electra, Kate in Other People's Money, Brook in Noises Off, and Nancy in The Country Girl. After an audition landed Van Dyck her first New York appearance in a new play at Playwrights Horizons, she would find herself spending a lot of time there and getting cast in a series of new plays. Although Van Dyck says she worked steadily for a remarkable couple of years, in typical fashion, Van Dyck discovers that stage acting has to be supplemented by doing voice-overs, short-term assignment on a TV series ("Law and Order" among others), and TV soap spots ("All My Children").
She won't deny that the last couple of years have been harder and slower because of this odd factor for women called age. "You get into your early thirties, and you're not twenty anymore and you're not forty." It gets a little tricky when you are in between," Van Dyck confides, as she realizes that age matters less in Shakespeare and "in this world we are creating." When Van Dyck suggests she may have missed her shot at Juliet, I remind her that Norma Shearer played her at 40.
Another director for whom Van Dyck has fond memories is the late Andre Ernotte, who directed her in Earth And Sky, for the Second Stage. Years later when Van Dyck auditioned for Ernotte who was preparing, The Learned Ladies for the McCarter Theater, he used the opportunity to give her a belated apology for making her wear an undershirt that he thought made her feel bad in Earth And Sky. Although the incident took place over three years earlier and was dismissed as unimportant by Van Dyck, Ernotte gave her the impression he could not forget about it and could now say how sorry he was. "He was a lovely, generous and gentle man," recalls Van Dyck. Van Dyck was among the cast that moved from Off-Broadway to Broadway in the New York Shakespeare Festival production of The Secret Rapture, directed by its author, David Hare.
Another Broadway role was in the short-lived Two Shakespearean Actors. Then she got what she described as a "joyous experience" as a part of the American cast that replaced the Irish in Dancing at Lughnasa. "We were encouraged not to see the running production so we could make it our own. Unlike many replacement casts, we started from scratch with director Patrick Mason and rehearsed for a full month. It was an exhilarating nine months and the most fun since I was a child," says Van Dyck. "I was always putting on plays as a child with my best friend, a running sort of serial drama called "Mother and Madeleine." With her friend playing the little girl that misbehaved all the time and Van Dyck always playing the mother, the saga, I am told, entertained both families up to and through the third grade.
Even before such an epic undertaking, Van Dyck played producer in the first grade for a production of Oliver!, giving herself the title role, of course. No surprise that little Miss Van Dyck would become active in an after-school Princeton activity called Creative Theatre Unlimited.
Reinforcing her dramatic endeavors at Princeton High, she gained further experience as an apprentice at Theatre Entime at Princeton U.
Confessing that she also loves regional theater, Van Dyck says she used to take anything that came along. "Now I'm getting more particular about the roles I will leave town for. About that out-of-town life upon the wicked stage, Van Dyck says "I left town with all the right spiritual values thanks to my father and mother. Van Dyck's father, Nicholas Van Dyck, is a retired Princeton minister who currently runs a Princeton-based non-profit educational organization called Religion in American Life. Equally active is Van Dyck's mother, Marcia Van Dyck, who continues to teach at Riverside Special Education Elementary School. With three successful sisters, one a Greek scholar who teaches at Columbia, another a marketing consultant in Portland, and another who is head of advertising for Nike, Van Dyck is the one who acts. For As You Like It director Scott Wentworth, Van Dyck is but one of a cast of love-struck characters that includes Ryan Artzberger, as Orlando; James Michael Reilly, as Jaques; Mark Elliot Wilson, as the Duke; and Scott Whitehurst, as Touchstone, who argue for and against a pastoral life.
With her reverential upbringing Van Dyck may one day feel the calling to write a play about a pastor's life. Until then it's the Forest of Arden and a bit of dirty politics. But, remember that these are only an excuse for a masquerading Rosalind to win the easily fooled Orlando; the devoted Celia to beguile the wicked Oliver; the "roynish" Touchstone to seduce the provocative Audrey; the disdainful Phebe to settle for the lovesick Silvius; and for them all to be united in wedded bliss before it is time for us to go home and to wish Jennifer and Jonathan a happy anniversary.
[As You Like It played at the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival's Kirby Shakespeare Theater through June 27, 1999.]
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