Dayna Lea Hoffmann and Alexandra Lainfiesta in As You Like It, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Ryan Parker
By Liz Nicholls,
The play that opens Friday in a park overlooking the river valley is all about finding yourself on an excursion to the great outdoors, “the green world.”
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No wonder the Freewill Shakespeare Festival, which has gone camping with their resident playwright for 35 summers, has been attracted before now to As You Like It. That impulse, to head to nature, is part of their history, their personality, their jam. And it’s taken them this summer to Louise McKinney Park with David Horak’s 12-actor production of Shakespeare’s buoyant mid-period romantic comedy As You Like It.
Troy O’Donnell (centre) with Amber Borotsik and Josh Meredith, in rehearsal for As You Like It, Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Jenn Galm
It’s Troy O’Donnell’s fifth As You Like It, as a range of characters from servants to shepherds to dukes. This time he’s in the juicy role of Touchstone, the courtier clown employee of a tyrannical usurper, who accompanies fellow refugees, the witty heroine Rosalind (Alexandra Lainfiesta) and her cousin Celia (Dayna Lea Hoffmann), en route to the Forest of Arden.
Troy O’Donnell as Adam, Andrew MacDonald-Smith as Orlando, As You LIke It, Freewill Shakespeare Festival 2015. Photo by Lucas Boutillier
O’Donnell is part of Freewill’s original story, a founding parent who’s still on the board of the theatre company that grew from hopeful co-op to professional rep company — and become a venerable civic institution. He remembers the moment 35 years ago when he and a brave band of his closest U of A theatre school classmates, six in all, shared a bright idea. It was 1989, and one of their number, Annette Loiselle, had been to Calgary’s Shakespeare in the Park the summer before. Alert to possibilities, they eyed the Edmonton scene for a similar niche. And they found one. How can you claim to be a real city and not have summer Shakespeare?
“There was very little going on (in June and July) at the time,” says O’Donnell, ever affable and articulate in conversation. “It was long before the Citadel did shows then, only the Mayfield was running … it was a fallow time.”
Poised on the threshold of careers, the new theatre school grads were keen to practice their craft. “It had been drilled into us,” he remembers, that at the start “we should create our own work… to show what we could do, beyond a two-minute audition.”
“We were young, naive, and enthusiastic,” he says of his fellow 22-year-olds. “If we’d had any idea of how much work it would be…” (eloquent pause and laughter). The debut production of the new co-op Free Will Players, a party-hearty production of The Comedy of Errors directed by Susan Cox on the Heritage Amphitheatre stage in Hawrelak Park, was their contribution, as he puts it, “to the ‘legend of beg, borrow, steal theatre’.”
Ironically, O’Donnell wasn’t actually in it. In the interim he’d landed a gig in Robin Phillips’ double bill of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Crucible at the Citadel. And Citadel rehearsals started early. “So I took photos and made props.” He still remembers “dumpster-diving, literally!, with Annette at her old high school,” and discovering an outsized metal key. They were exultant.
In the Freewill summers that followed, O’Donnell found himself in all kinds of Shakespearean roles — comedies at first, then starting in 1998, comedies that played in rep with tragedies, histories, romances. Freewill’s first As You Like It was 1995; after that its stage mate was Richard III twice (2001 and 2008), and Coriolanus (2015).
Troy O’Donnell as Malvolio in Twelfth Night, Freewill Shakespeare Festival, 2011. Photo supplied
“On my tombstone they should put ‘servants, sidekicks, serviceable villains’,” says O’Donnell of his own Freewill history. Not to mention comic showstopper buffoons like the preposterous Don Armado in Love’s Labours Lost. “I’ve had my stockings garter’d twice,” O’Donnell says of the two Twelfth Nights in which he’s played the uppity servant Malvolio (most recently, in a spiegeltent in 2023).
As the quick-witted servant Grumio in The Taming of the Shrew, O’Donnell has ridden pellmell toward the stage on a motorcycle behind Julien Arnold’s Petruchio — and crashed. “Julien went to turn, on the gravel in the parking lot, and we went down. We got up and waved to the stage manager we were alive. She ran over and said ‘if you’re OK, park it and go!’. The two of us staggered onto the stage and collapsed.” The audience roared.
The young Troy O’Donnell as Lysander, Grade 4 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Photo supplied.
A certain inevitability attaches to O’Donnell’s relationship to Shakespeare, since it started in Grade 4. At Greenfield Elementary, as he explains, his debut was one of Macduff’s soldiers in Macbeth. He remembers his dad covering wooden salad bowls with tinfoil, for helmets. And the next year he rocketed to stardom as Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “Our teacher believed in introducing kids to theatre and Shakespeare.” It took, big time.
Since that breakthrough role in Grade 5, O’Donnell has been in no fewer than eight Midsummer Night’s Dreams, at Freewill and elsewhere (and directed three). And it’s probably his favourite Shakespeare, “both for the number of times I’ve done it, and the beautiful language.”
As for As You Like It, his first was a double-assignment as Oliver, the hero’s “the angry brother” and the young shepherd William. He’s played Duke Senior (the one who’s holding court out in the forest) a couple of times. He’s played Adam, Orlando’s servant…. And now, Touchstone. The character, as O’Donnell points out, is often played as a young urbanite, a hipster slumming in the woods, resentful, and exercising his wits at the expense of the locals. His Touchstone won’t be like that. “I’m an older Touchstone,” he says. “And I looked at the shift in power at court…. He’s been turned into a sort of messenger boy. He’s been the court Fool for many years. And now, the (usurping) Duke is ordering him to ‘go tell my daughter something’….. it’s not fun any more for him. And he’s ‘lemme out!’.”
O’Donnell says he’ll mine a reflective streak in the clown, inspired by the passing remark in the play about an unrequited love in Touchstone’s past. “He’s alone; the love of his life was a lost love.” In the forest, Touchstone will have a renaissance when he falls for the sweet country bumpkin Audrey.
As a Freewill founder and veteran cast member O’Donnell is hoping that this summer will be the company’s last in its extended exile from their traditional home in Hawrelak Park. First, the trials of COVID, then the city’s stunning decision to close the park for three YEARS for renovations. It’s been a test of resourcefulness and agility. Let no one argue the Shakespeareans haven’t been adaptable, a peripatetic life that took them to community leagues, small parks, a spiegeltent at Northlands, the Fringe, people’s backyards….
Louise McKinney Park, where Freewill presented small-cast adaptations of Macbeth and Much Ado About Nothing in 2021, is workable exile. But, as in last year’s tour of community hockey rinks, “there are extra expenses, for fencing, for security, for porta-potties….” And Mother Nature, always credited as Ambience Director in Freewill programs, gets to ham it up when there’s no tent cover.
The goal with the current Save Freewill Crowdfunding campaign, says O’Donnell echoing Horak, is to return to Hawrelak Park in 2026, “boldly, at full strength. Two big productions in rep, full casts of 15 or 16,” with all the trimmings including original music and design.
It’s time for a homecoming.
Contribute to Save Freewill at crowdfunding.alberta.ca.
PREVIEW
As You Like It
Freewill Shakespeare Festival
Directed and adapted by: David Horak
Starring: Mhairi Berg, Amber Borotsik, Brennan Campbell, Nadien Chu, Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Alexandra Lainfiesta, Dayna Lee Hoffmann, Ian Leung, Josh Meredith, Troy O’Donnell, Cody Porter, Elena Porter
Where: Louise McKinney Riverfront Park, 9999 Grierson Hill
Running: June 27 to July 20
Tickets: freewill.bespoketicketing.com
