STAGE REVIEW : BARD SQUAD MAKES IT LOOK SIMPLE

Five actors doing “As You Like It” sounds like a stunt. As a matter of fact, it is a stunt. The surprise is that it can also be the play.

The surprise Wednesday night at Occidental College was a little less than last year, when another five-person squad from the Royal Shakespeare Company first pulled the trick with “Twelfth Night.” Still, this is a dazzling demonstration of how little it takes to conjure up a play, given actors who know how to play. (See Page 2.)

This isn’t an official RSC production, merely an adjunct to its work with American college students. But it is in the best tradition of the Royal Shakespeare Company, with the arc of every speech as clear as an arrow and a separate identity card for each character.

Let’s be clear. These actors aren’t doing “Scenes from ‘As You Like It.’ ” They are doing the whole play, including some parts that usually get cut. This means that everybody has to play at least three major characters, some of them simultaneously.

The most spectacular example Wednesday night (the show will be repeated Saturday at Occidental and the following Saturday at Cal State Fullerton) was the wrestling match between Orlando and the hulking Charles. Gerard Murphy undertook both sides of this tag match, and it was always clear whether Goliath had pinned David, or (hooray!) the reverse.

Sometimes the job was to go from one character to the other in one beat. Patrick Godfrey finished Jacques’ “Seven ages of man” speech with a flourish . . . and became Orlando’s feeble servant, Adam, staggering off with his arm around his master’s shoulder.

Costume hints weren’t allowed, nor special lighting, nor scenery of any sort. It was all done with the voice and the body, trusting that the audience would pick up on who Actor X was now. Mostly we did. (There was some blur between Lynsey Baxter’s Phoebe and Audrey, but the characters aren’t that distinct in the play either.)

At the same time, we never forgot who Actor X was in his own right. The show took on the aspects of a game of charades, very much in keeping with the spirit of Shakespeare’s comedy, yet not excluding feeling. Significantly, Jennie Stoller didn’t devise a different persona for Rosalind when she pretended to be a boy. We felt Rosalind speaking past her disguise, hoping that Orlando would hear her real voice.

A subtle choice, and apparently Stoller’s own choice. There’s no director’s credit in the program. Can five actors direct themselves? It would seem that they can, given the same training and the same level of skill (Baxter perhaps the exception here, the one voice that needs ripening.)

It also seems that such actors can make organic discoveries about the text that a conceptual director might miss. Time and again Wednesday night, one had the feeling that performances at Shakespeare’s Globe must have been like this: swiftly paced, keenly spoken, played very much to the audience and unencumbered by visual guck. The trees on which Orlando carves Rosalind’s name turn out to be much funnier when they’re not literally there--and much easier to move when the scene changes.

The play was indeed the thing, a more light-hearted “As You Like It” than I’ve ever seen, but not without a pang or two of homesickness for the court. A whippoorwill’s cry would bring it on, or the bleat of a lamb. The actors supplied those too. And sang as sweetly as an Elizabethan consort.

Touchstone (Alan David) even brought the audience into the act, for one of his routines, which--it has never been more clear--is the way to think of Shakespeare’s clown interludes: as ad-lib cadenzas for a comic with his own bag of shticks.

This “As You Like It” may not be based on an existing RSC production, but it wouldn’t be at all a bad model for a future Royal Shakespeare production, the plainer the better. Our directors and actors could also learn much from the show’s economy and its sense of what the priorities are in playing Shakespeare. When you know how to make the shot, you don’t need a fancy game plan.

It plays at 8:15 p.m. Saturday at Thorne Hall, Occidental (259-2737), and at 2 and 8 p.m. March 9 at Cal State Fullerton (714-773-3371). The company plays “Samuel Beckett This Evening” tonight at Occidental and at Fullerton Tuesday and next Friday night (same curtain times).