Shakespeare at the Manor Revived with 'As You Like It'

Like Juliet awakening after her false death, the Shakespeare at the Manor series returns to Sylvester Manor Educational Farm after seemingly dying five years ago. Robin Aren Productions presents two outdoor performances of As You Like It, directed by Allen O’Reilly, at 6 p.m. on Saturday, July 27 and Sunday July 28.

A little more than a year ago, shortly after O’Reilly and his wife Teresa DeBerry moved to Shelter Island, O’Reilly took a stroll to explore his new surroundings and noticed a grand yellow manor house in the distance. Eager to learn more, he began researching the history, mission and programming of what turned out to be Sylvester Manor, including their then-defunct Shakespeare at the Manor series.

As his research uncovered, the series debuted in the early 2010s as a program for adults performed by Juilliard School graduates on the grounds of Sylvester Manor. Its last performance took place in 2019 before COVID-19 put the series on hiatus. The original incarnation was very text-driven with minimal staging and costuming — a direction that has proven effective in presenting works of Shakespeare — but O’Reilly felt that this series could use a boost in production value. With support from Robin Aren Productions, founded in 2023 to produce a project directed by O’Reilly, he was confident that a relaunch of Shakespeare at the Manor could be something great.

“My major background and life’s work is to do the plays of Shakespeare, so any opportunity to do it is very fascinating and interesting to me,” says O’Reilly, who enjoyed a 24-season stint at an Atlanta Shakespeare company before joining Bay Street Theater as their director of education and community outreach.

Following a cold call to Sylvester Manor Executive Director Stephen Searl, O’Reilly was put in charge of reviving Shakespeare at the Manor. “You literally stumble across these things sometimes, and that’s exactly what happened,” he says of his fated stroll through Shelter Island.

As a nod to the origins of Shakespeare at the Manor, O’Reilly elected to produce the 1599 pastoral comedy As You Like It, which was first presented by the Green Theatre Collective in 2012 before Shakespeare at the Manor became an official series. “This seemed like an ideal show for the manor house and certainly for the beautiful grounds, the fauna and the trees that are there by the creek,” O’Reilly explains.

With a Theatre Authority contract in hand, O’Reilly put out a call for actors and received more than one thousand audition submissions. The final cast of 12 comprises actors from the East End and New York City, including O’Reilly and DeBerry, Matthew Conlon, Gabriel Portuondo, Anna Francesca Schiavoni, Angie Harrell and John Drinkwater, who doubles as the show’s composer.

For the costuming, O’Reilly envisioned a clear distinction between the two worlds of As You Like It. The court scenes set in France feature period-appropriate dresses and coattails, while the outfits in the Forest of Arden are more contemporary and hippie-inspired. As luck would have it, Schiavoni’s mother, Andrea Schiavoni, has a costume collection containing lightweight pieces for portraying the necessary aesthetics in the summer heat.

With the show’s outdoor staging forgoing lights and microphones, the onus of directing the audience’s attention is placed entirely on each actor. This is commonly achieved by projecting; however, O’Reilly emphasizes the prioritization of “diction, clarity and focusing your voice” to preserve the vocal health of his actors. “That’s what our challenge is out here in telling the story,” he says. “That and also going (against our acting training) to look directly at the other person in the scene with us. We’re going away from that toward more of a presentational style, because doing it outdoors really lends itself to that model.”

Additionally, a presentational style better incorporates the audience into the story, O’Reilly says. “(While) never forgetting our wonderful scene partners on stage, (we’re) really telling the story and engaging the audience as another character,” he continues.

Helping audiences to engage with the works of Shakespeare is an immensely important and rewarding task for O’Reilly. “I think that it’s still alive, it’s still vibrant, and it still shifts with our times, even 450-plus years later. It’s still accessible if we do our jobs, and it still has a profound impact on the nature of humanity,” he shares. “I firmly believe, like so many people out there, that (Shakespeare’s works are) meant to be said, not read. … And that credo is a real passion, as you might be able to tell.”

For tickets to As You Like It, visit sylvestermanor.org/event/shakespeare-at-the-manor.