Director José Zayas is back at the Blackfriars Playhouse this Summer to revisit the forest of Arden since his first time directing the show at age 20. From his first experience directing the play as a college student to his current interpretation decades later, José explores how Shakespeare’s beloved comedy, As You Like It, has evolved for him into a meditation on aging, memory, love, family, and the passage of time.

Watch the interview, then come see As You Like It on stage at the Blackfriars Playhouse.

(Transcript auto-generated by YouTube)

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I like to think of it almost like she’s telling us a fairy tale of her youth, and at the end, she’s able to, as an adult, connect with us in a very different way.
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8 seconds
Hi everyone. I’m José Zayas . I’m the director of As You Like It at the American Shakespeare Center.
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13 seconds
Well, thank you so much for sitting down with me today, José. Of course.
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16 seconds
I’m really excited to talk to you about um this 2026 summer performance of As You Like It. I heard it was one of your first Shakespeare plays.
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23 seconds
It was. Yes. Yeah. I directed As You Like It when I was 20. I was at Harvard University. I was an undergraduate, and it was my first
0:31
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attempt at it ever. So, it was a crazy production. Very wild. It was one of those like everything but the kitchen sink approaches to it.
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38 seconds
How have you seen it kind of change and evolve through that time?
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I mean, obviously, I know how to direct now. So, it, you know, at that moment was an experiment. This time I’m like, it’s more cohesive. I’ve
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distilled a lot of information since then. First time I did it, it was a play about love. It was a play about
0:56
56 seconds
madness and limonality, and I was just about to leave college. So, sort of like the journey of Rosalind into Arden felt very personal in many ways, and sort of
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1 minute, 4 seconds
out of it as a sort of a space for exploration and playfulness, and this time it’s a play about aging. I
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1 minute, 13 seconds
feel that it’s a play in which we hopefully really look at the idea of time and how everyone navigates it
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1 minute, 20 seconds
very differently. How can we kind of as an audience, see that theme come across during the show?
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1 minute, 26 seconds
I mean, the first image I use is a sundial. So we’re already thinking about how time functions in this world, and be able to see it in the movements from one world into another, from dark into light.
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1 minute, 37 seconds
I use a lot of music sort of hand, I mean, it’s interesting how Shakespeare uses music in this particular text
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1 minute, 44 seconds
because it does suspend time. It allows us to spend time in Arden in a very unrushed way. It’s a very messy play
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1 minute, 53 seconds
with a lot of strange plots and a lot of digressions. But those moments where
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1 minute, 59 seconds
musicality, where the gentleness of the plot and its ironies, I think, are a lot more focused for me this time. And
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2 minutes, 8 seconds
I’m hoping that the audience sort of sees how, when people go to Arden, it’s an attempt to stop time in many
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2 minutes, 16 seconds
ways or to sort of like confront the idea of what time is. Hence, you know, the most famous speech in the play is the seven ages of man speech. All the world’s a stage and then it goes through
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2 minutes, 25 seconds
like this is what it’s like to age in life. , and I’m hoping that people have that experience and that it almost
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2 minutes, 33 seconds
feels like it’s Rosalind’s memory play in many ways, and that it’s somebody who, at the end of the play, turns to us
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2 minutes, 42 seconds
with many of the lessons that she’s learned. I’d like to think of it almost like she’s telling us a fairy tale of her youth, and at the end
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2 minutes, 51 seconds
she’s able to, as an adult, connect with us in a very different way.
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2 minutes, 55 seconds
It’s very funny, but it’s also very poignant at times.
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2 minutes, 58 seconds
speaking of the ” all the world’s a stage” speech. Um, and I was curious how you kind of figured out that line and navigated that kind of duality.
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I hope it works. I mean, we have our first audience tonight. You never know with plays like this. I mean, we know it works As You Like It has been done
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3 minutes, 13 seconds
so so often, and it’s a beautiful summer play. So, people do it all the time.
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3 minutes, 17 seconds
But, in the first part of the play, the first act takes place in the court, and it’s almost a tragedy. So for me, I’ve
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3 minutes, 24 seconds
taken that first section that involves fights and family dynamics that are very tense, and exiles and
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banishments and I’ve taken that very very seriously. and hopefully, by seeding that very carefully, it makes the
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3 minutes, 40 seconds
trip into Arden sort of a release, and then each scene you just sort of take it for what it is. If you trust
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3 minutes, 47 seconds
Shakespeare, and if you trust that in contrasting tonalities, and that’s what makes Shakespeare so interesting, then
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3 minutes, 54 seconds
it just sort of takes care of itself in its own weird way. And of course, I am dealing with some wonderfully adept clowns who also are able to ground
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things in great textures and great truth. So I think it’s always just sort of really staying focused on that.
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The explosion into Arden, which was so beautiful. Can you talk a little bit about, without giving too much away, how you kind of crafted that?
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Sure. I mean, I think one of the great things when doing Shakespeare is you can think about how the scenes move, how language works. Every production is
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going to have a very different dialogue with the text. Every director, every cast and I was really interested in the idea that the court world
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4 minutes, 33 seconds
happens just in one movement. The play is usually structured or the way Shakespeare wrote it, there’s a court
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4 minutes, 40 seconds
scene and then there’s a scene in Arden, and then you go back to the court, so the first thing that I did is I moved all the scenes in the court so that they
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4 minutes, 48 seconds
rise in action as the stakes become higher, everything begins to build. I almost treat it like a bit of an
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4 minutes, 55 seconds
action narrative as it progresses into the last three scenes in that act, and what that allowed me to do is allowed me to sort of build attention to such a
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moment then there’s this beautiful explosion of color into Arden. And so, you know, the techniques that I used were the court world is all black and white.
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So, it’s very stark and very severe and very elegant. And then that way there’s a really big contrast going into the forest, where everything becomes earth
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tones and greens and jewels and sort of a kaleidoscope of color.
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5 minutes, 27 seconds
Well, there are tons of fantastic moments within the show. Is there one that really stands out to you?
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5 minutes, 32 seconds
I love the ending. We’re using a song that’s sort of like you know we’ve used music we’ve created new original music for the show based on his lyrics
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5 minutes, 41 seconds
and then we’ve added a song and I always like one of the big things about doing it here is because we don’t have traditional sound effects or light
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5 minutes, 49 seconds
I’m always thinking, how do I end an act, how do I end the show, and I love musical numbers, so you know there’s a vocabulary that’s built here because the
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5 minutes, 58 seconds
actors get to sing and sort of perform songs during the pre-show and intermission. And so, I’m always
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6 minutes, 7 seconds
thinking about how to weave new music into it, and allowing it to feel like it’s part of that world and that vocabulary. So, I think the ending
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6 minutes, 15 seconds
where, the marriages all happen, and all the actors are singing this final song and playing the music
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simultaneously to the audience and to each other is, be surprised at how poignant it’s felt. mostly because I
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6 minutes, 29 seconds
think the song that we’re using is very much about time and it’s a love song and it has a delicacy to it that I think is very surprising.
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Were there any surprises that came through the rehearsal process?
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Oh, everything’s a surprise. I mean, you collaborate. You come in with a strong idea, hopefully about what you want to do, but I’m someone who I
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just do that in order to start the conversation. The missing part at that point is the performers, the collaboration with them. So every day is
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6 minutes, 57 seconds
a bit of a surprise as they teach me what the play can do and what their storytelling is inside that. So things
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7 minutes, 6 seconds
that I think I know about the play are always changed. They’re always shifted by that.
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7 minutes, 12 seconds
What’s um important about engaging with this show in the Blackfires Playhouse, this space here in 2026, As You Like It is one of Shakespeare’s
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greatest comedies. If you’ve never seen it, then it’s a great way to introduce yourself to it with great performance and what I hope is a great, clear
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7 minutes, 29 seconds
production that really takes you through it and um helps you feel that it’s very modern. Even though I’m setting it in a
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7 minutes, 36 seconds
vaguely Edwardian Victorian setting, which is a little inspired by mostly by Edward Gory, I’m hoping that
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7 minutes, 45 seconds
The way we use language feels very contemporary. And I think that’s what always happens in the Blackfriars. There’s such an immediacy
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to staging something here and to the relationship between the actors and the audience, that it makes the text come alive in a way that I’ve never
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experienced in any other theater when watching Shakespeare like anybody who comes here for the first time I think will have a bit of a revolutionary experience.
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So for me that’s the first thing for those who don’t know it. For those who know it, I hope they engage in the dialogue we’re having around the text
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in a way that excites them in a way that makes them think of things that they’ve already thought about
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differently, so that they hear material in a new way. You can never predict what that’s going to be. But I’m always
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excited by the possibilities of that, by hearing new actors deliver this text.
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You engage with the material in a different way, and it’s a play you know and it’s a play about family, and it’s a play
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about gender, and it’s a play about how to love and how we are able to love, and Rosalind, of course, being one
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of Shakespeare’s greatest female characters I think takes us on this really beautiful and complicated journey
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as she herself is trying to figure out her place in the world, so I think her journey is our journey in many ways as well. If you could have the audience
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take away something from the show, what is something you would have the audience take away?
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9 minutes, 14 seconds
Oh, I’ll tell you. I never think about what to take away cuz I think everybody is going to have a very different experience.
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9 minutes, 23 seconds
And I hope that the production allows for that. But ultimately, I just want them to be moved. I want them to find
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9 minutes, 30 seconds
something in it that makes them think about their family, about
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9 minutes, 37 seconds
their loves, about how we navigate relationships. And that even hundreds of years after this play premiered, that
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it’s still something that is truthful and universal, and that we see people struggling to find contentment and
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yearning for connection, and that is something that touches everybody deeply.