by Richard Beck

The second of three seasons of The Bridge Project, a partnership of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Old Vic and Neal Street, is closing at BAM this week. Last year, Sam Mendes staged The Winter’s Tale and The Cherry Orchard here; this year it’s The Tempest and As You Like It. Two of those plays are romances, involving love but also magic, sadness, and personal redemption. One, written as a comedy, is regularly performed as a tragedy, which means that audiences see it as a little of both. As You Like It is a straightforward comedy, but here Mendes has added a torture scene, which isn’t very funny.

These kinds of emotional middle grounds are characteristic of Mendes, who works harder at creating moods than at anything else. He has his own take on whatever the emotion is that has equal parts sadness and hope-it’s what you get at the end of a Grey’s Anatomy episode or an Allstate commercial (Are you in good hands? I want to be. I think I am?! [cries]). Five films in, his career’s iconic moment is still American Beauty’s Wes Bentley (late of Ghost Rider) filming the garbage bag swirling around. He has made two movies about how the suburbs are suffocating. So: this is not exactly an ideas guy.

Both of this year’s productions can be boring, but both are also lots of fun to watch. BAM’s Harvey Theater is attractively dilapidated, and Tom Piper’s sets and Catherine Zuber’s costumes match: wood, nice muted color palettes, lots of “exposed” stuff. It’s a semi-industrialized version of shabby chic, AKA what “Brooklyn” looks like. There’s also some great acting by both Brits and Americans (transatlanticism being the point of the Bridge Project). If you have twenty bucks and a free evening, it would be a good idea to go see one. Here’s how you might choose.

As You Like It is a satire on the pastoral, a genre that isn’t doing too well these days outside of Thomas Kinkade paintings. Its plot is: a bunch of courtiers head into the forest of Arden, where they meet, make fun of and then sometimes fall in love with simple folk. Today we still more or less understand the pastoral’s broader outlines-simpler times, trees, unsophisticated honesty-but many of the specifics have been forgotten. So you get the feeling, as you watch people banter, that you’re missing things. I mean the play is four hundred years old, after all.

Fortunately you can turn to Rosalind for guidance, because she gets everything. Rosalind, played by Juliet Rylance (who is really good), is the kind of genius-level intelligent character that people who aren’t Shakespeare don’t write very often. There’s a really well-directed moment early on where Touchstone the clown is playing word games with Rosalind and her best friend Celia (if you are anti-pun, you should see another play, and probably steer clear of Shakespeare or fun in general). Touchstone is quick, but Rosalind is quicker, and finishes one of his riddles for him, while Celia looks on blankly.

Rosalind then meets Orlando, who is played by Rylance’s real-life husband Christian Camargo. They fall immediately and awkwardly in love, and then each is separately forced to leave Duke Frederick’s kingdom. When they meet again in Arden, Orlando is hanging his terrible love poems all over the place, on trees, and Rosalind is disguised as a man.

Now at this point what’s supposed to happen is some A-level onstage flirting. Rosalind is in love, but she’s smart enough to be suspicious of having gone head over heels so quickly, and she also knows that Orlando is a little immature (“From the east to western Ind / No jewel is like Rosalind,” is how one of his tree-poems starts, which seems like a pretty obvious call for concern). So, disguised as Ganymede, she tells Orlando that she will help him snap out of his infatuation. All he has to do is visit her/him every day, pretend that she/he is Rosalind, and try to woo her. This is an awesome plan.

But Carmago ruins things by playing it as though Orlando really can’t see the woman he loves underneath the summery blazer and straw fedora. So instead of insane sparks flying all over the place, we get Orlando being genuinely confused about why this short guy in the forest is so into the little role-play they have going. After they kiss, Carmago gets embarrassed at having done a gay thing. I’m not going to quote every line of Orlando’s that is obviously flirting, but they are everywhere. It seems impossible to me that Rosalind would fall for someone who was actually that dumb. (As a suitor, Orlando gets especially upstaged by the peasant Silvius, who is played by Aaron Krohn. He tells the woman he loves — who can’t stand him, by the way — that he will marry her “though to have her and death were one thing.” That, it seems to me, is how you do it.)

The other best thing about As You Like It is the melancholic Jacques (that’s “Jay-kwees”). He’s played by Stephen Dillane, who is great in almost everything. In the first place, he has the advantage of looking a little like Daniel Day-Lewis, which is a great way for an actor to look. He does a funny Bob Dylan impression in the second act, and he also delivers the “All the world’s a stage” speech like it’s just something he decided to say, as opposed to the “All the world’s a stage” speech. He makes his first appearance by asking a group of musicians to keep singing. They’re pretty tired of singing, and somebody’s voice is hoarse, but Jacques is insistent: “I can suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs,” he says. I identified hard with that line.

Dillane, as Prospero, is also the best reason to go see The Tempest, although he sometimes drops his voice so low that it’s difficult to hear. As the play is set on an explicitly magical island, it also involves more stage tricks, which are gracefully done. The acting is not quite as good, and there are fewer jokes; but if you are interested in monsters with skull-heads, island spirits with scary metallic wings, and reflecting pools, The Tempest is probably what you’ll want to see.

Richard Beck is from Wallingford, Pennsylvania.

New Yorkers, who are so often stuck at the intersection between life and art (usually because the traffic signal is broken), have another issue to contend with: A series of statues that will be placed on building across the city-and, less worryingly, in Madison Square Park-is already confusing residents, some of whom are concerned that life-sized sculptures are actually jumpers.

Artist Antony Gormley-best known for Britain’s massive Angel of the North–says of the installation,

I don’t know what is going to happen, what it will look and feel like, but I want to play with the city and people’s perceptions. My intention is to get the sculptures as close to the edge of the buildings as possible. The field of the installation should have no defining boundary. The gaze is the principle dynamic of the work; the idea of looking and finding, or looking and seeking, and in the process perhaps re-assessing your own position in the world. So in encountering these peripheral things, perhaps one becomes aware of one’s status of embedment.

Sure thing, buddy! Anyway, this being New York, the story would not be complete without a reference to Our Greatest Tragedy.

Malcolm Sparrow, a former law enforcement official who now teaches law enforcement officials management skills at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, said he had not seen the figures but thought they would cause problems.

“If it’s modern art, I think it’s in poor taste for residents of New York City,” because of the “memory of people jumping off buildings,” he said, referring to people who leapt to their deaths from the World Trade Center towers on 9/11.

As someone who is still traumatized by the memory of all those painted fiberglass cows from years back, I guess I can see his point.

Okay, we can all sleep at night. The National Archives and Records Administration has asked the Justice Department to investigate the missing John Yoo emails; Justice says there is a “review” underway. So no matter what the torture-justifier says about his missing emails-”They should be easy to find,” LOL!-eventually we’ll get there.

Perhaps because of the slow post-Oscar news cycle, the media is really milking the story of the woman whose lactation is being turned into cheese by her chef husband. The New York Post was able to squeeze out more from its piece yesterday, putting her on today’s cover, while the Daily Beast gets Gael Greene to dribble her reaction to actually eating the stuff. The story is also getting splashed all over local television news. It’s almost insulting when you consider what kind of boobs journalists must think you are to be interested in this “news,” when, at most, 2% of you actually care. To be honest, I regret keeping you abreast of these events. The whole thing makes me feel a little sour. I mean, it’s UDDERLY RIDICULOUS!

And now the brilliant New York State Assembly has a bill that would apparently, really, ban all salt usage in restaurants. No seriously, this is the description in full: “Prohibits the use of salt by restaurants in the preparation of food by restaurants.” It is off to the Committee on Health, where they are going to laugh and laugh and roll around on the floor and laugh some more before deep-sixing it in some filing cabinet somewhere. WON’T SOMEONE LOBBY FOR THE SALT INDUSTRY? (via)

27 people canceled their subscriptions to the Washington Post when the paper ran this picture on its front page with a story about same-sex marriages licenses being issued in DC. The Post ombudsman describes the complaints he’s received, which include the usual homophobic rants and the more measured “This disturbs me and it should be buried” reactions. And, as happens EVERY SINGLE TIME a homosexual couple is shown doing something so perfectly pedestrian that it would be completely unremarkable if its subjects were straight, there was this: “I would appreciate it if your cover pictures would not be so disturbing where my kids can see it easily on the kitchen table… please don’t shove this ‘Gay’ business in our face.” I suppose we should applaud the complainant for eschewing the more commonplace “ram it down our throats,” but can’t they find a new way to proclaim their displeasure? I am sick and tired of having these ignorant expressions of disgust jammed up my ass.

My obsession, “One Madison Park,” the super-skinny building that went up at the foot of Madison Ave. and 23rd Street, looming over Shake Shack, mostly full of full-floor apartments that we thought had been all bought up by rich Irish people (not rich any more!) and Arabs (some rich still!), has turned out to be a total shit-show in the finest New York tradition. This is a very bad scene. Now the co-builders are suing each other, the debt-holding bank is suing the builders for foreclosure, and there are also a dozen other lawsuits floating around. Some of the most fascinating stuff: when the builders couldn’t sell units back in the glory days of 2007, the builders brought on an ad guy. His fee? Two apartments and $800,000. Ladies, we are all in the wrong business. Annnnnd here comes the punchline: now, “about a dozen of the building’s 90 condos are occupied.” Oof.

John Lanchester, writing in the LRB, takes a look at the state of the British economy. Here’s his prediction for the near future:

At the moment, thanks to the subjective mildness of the recession, we are still in denial. Next, as the full extent of the bill becomes clearer, there will be anger, especially since the hard times will have next to no effect on the bankers and politicians who, in the public mind, caused the crisis. Then there will be a helpful-for-the-government period of inflation. Then interest rates will shoot up in an attempt to control inflation, and at the same time we will see tax rises, services closing and job losses. It’s at this point, as the recovery begins to seem like a tractionless slog, that we’ll go through the depression stage of the cycle.

We’re probably a little further along over here, but either way, it’s not a lot to look forward to.

Here’s another excellent advance to stoke the fire for Big Boi’s long awaited Sir Luscious Leftfoot: The Son of Chico Dusty album. As he proved back on “Synthesizer” from 1998’s Aquemeni, no rapper makes George Clinton sound more at home. Too Short seems pretty comfortable with his gray whiskers, too. They’re all very dope.

In the wake of another Catholic Church sex scandal, the Pope’s brother-a former choirmaster at a church boarding school-admits that he used to slap his young charges around, but denies ever messing with them.