No Absolution

Saturday Night's Performance of Cliff Cardinal's 'As You Like It'

Towards the end of Cliff Cardinal’s scorching retelling of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, a character shares a story about his Aunt’s methodology for dealing with crystal meth addiction: She punches the shit out of a person with two hands full of turquoise rings. It’s an apt image for Cardinal’s adaptation which, without too much revealing the genius, delivers swift, unrelenting blows to its (primarily white, at least when I saw it) audience. Another summation of the evening, also from the end of the play, could be Cardinal’s parting words “We’re supposed to be family. But we’re not.”

And family we weren’t at NYU’s Skirball Center last Saturday evening, at least not the kind one hopes for. There was some slight shifting, perhaps an intake of breath towards the beginning, when Cardinal (who is Cree and Lakota) stepped out to deliver a land acknowledgement. He in one breath condemned Under the Radar (and all theater of a certain esteem) for its inevitable involvement in oil money, in another rebuked the people of the Upper East Side for participating in apartheid. Several scattered comments erupted as the acknowledgement continued, but the real fight didn’t begin until the play started proper. A character listed off assumptions he had about white people, one of them being that they owned property. “Not in New York!” shouted a woman towards the front. As the list continued a man in the back added “Wrong on all accounts!” This was enough to stop the show. A taut exchange was had, the house lights were raised, the man was invited to leave. The man demanded the actor leave the stage (to supportive applause from the audience) and his money back. The actor regained his line from the stage manager (an act that would repeat multiple times throughout the night as the disruptions became more frequent and intense) and continued.

Soon, the walkouts began. It was not so much a mass exodus as a continual trickle beginning around the time of the first audience outburst. (Amazing, in this writer’s opinion, given the explicit invitation to leave first in this instance and then repeated about fifteen minutes later during another confrontation.) The actors, for their part, did not back down. “You’re not a farm animal. Stop shouting at me.” An actor sniped at the same man, after the third or fourth interruption. To the woman, who also continued to speak out, he offered two options: Watch the play without interrupting or leave. Lines were drawn in the audience. Some shouted down the naysayers, some joined them. Upon the second raising of the house lights, I was pleasantly surprised (maybe even moved) to see the older woman sitting next to me (who had been all but curling in on herself as the show progressed) cheering for the play to continue.

Cardinal himself briefly left the stage after one of the nastier confrontations. Hushed murmuring – would the show continue? (And this, ultimately, is what made the conflict between audience and performer so alive. Cardinal was clearly affected by the interruptions and he still continued. That’s bravery.) But Cliff Cardinal, whose other work includes gut-punch solo show Huff and twisty, macabre A Terrible Fate, has (no other way to put it) balls of steel. He returned with a quip about the backstage band and continued the show, fighting with those who sought to put it to an end. Towards the end of the especially rocky part (the last twenty minutes or so were essentially peaceful) he threw a lifeline. “Look. I’ve been where you are.” He said to an angry audience member. “I’ve sat where you sit, and I’ve watched things on this stage that have made me uncomfortable.” Then, an invitation for the member to consider himself as not the center of the universe. This last part didn’t go over so well.

I won’t speak much about the content of As You Like It so as not to dull the blade of the show and because the revelation of the performance is primarily in its magic trick of adaptation. Cardinal’s script has room for humor, empathy, wickedness - but Saturday’s performance was more of an all out brawl between people doing a play and people who didn’t like the play. It’s the first time I’ve been at a show with an active audience effort to stop the performance from happening. Such athletic social outrage felt like a relic to me. Not since The Rite of Spring.

It’s a testament to Cardinal’s audacity, not to mention rhetorical craft, that he managed to stir such a riot. To achieve anything near that inside a well-manicured theater in 2024 is amazing. The night changed my mind about something, too. I’ve been feeling pretty firmly that theater no longer has protest power. Direct activism seems basically severed from the form - energy better spent calling, emailing, marching, almost anything else. (Internal change, nuanced consideration, all that still absolutely achievable. This is what theater makes beautiful - grief and gentleness.) But Saturday night there was protest on stage. There was disruption towards change. It existed. It was brave and exciting and harrowing and it changed my mind. It was there. And how amazing is that? It was there.

Absolution and its absence have come into focus recently. Cliff Cardinal’s As You Like It was blistering. No absolution was offered to the audience, nor should it have been. I was moved, however, by a small exchange of benedictions between performer and audience post-show. Cardinal stepped out after the curtain call ostensibly to address the contention of the night’s performance. Upon seeing him, many stood and cheered their support. He, in turn, thanked the people who stayed for staying. A small exchange of blessings - no forgiveness. Still, I felt as though something had been exorcised. And then everybody went home.