Galatea by Treehouse Shakespeare Ensemble at The Wharf Studio (review)

Reviewed by: Galateaby Treehouse Shakespeare Ensemble at The Wharf Studio Cory Drozdowski GalateaPresented by Treehouse Shakespeare Ensemble at The Wharf Studio, Staunton, VA. 1911 2022, 2111 2022, and 25–2603 2023. Directed by Cole Metz. Dramaturgy by Keith Taylor. With Ariel Tatum (Galatea/others), Kara Hankard (Phillida/others), Beth Harris (Tityra/Melebea/others), Rosemary Richards (Rafe/others), and Mikaela Hanrahan (Cupid/others). In John Lyly's Galatea, the opportunity—or necessity—of trying on different identities provides the perfect environment for liberated self-discovery. Whether through exploring their sexuality while disguised as boys in the forest or trying on the hats of various mystic teachers, the central characters of the play find the stimulus for individual truth and learning in the upheavals and inversions that animate the action of the plot. Treehouse Shakespeare Ensemble's production brought this out through a wonderful sense of play that supported the liberated exploration of the young characters. The play's overall structure follows, essentially, three primary plotlines. The first is the love story between the two girls—Galatea and Phyllida—disguised as boys. So disguised by their parents in order to avoid being sacrificed to Neptune's monster, The Agar, the two girls meet in the forest and fall for each other, not realizing that they are both actually girls. The second plot follows the marooned Rafe, who splits from his brothers in [End Page 276]the pursuit of a living before sequentially encountering and attempting to be an apprentice to increasingly ridiculous mystical masters. Finally, the third plot sees the prankster Cupid messing with Diana's nymphs by making them fall in love against their mistress's code of chastity. Throughout each of these stories, elements of Treehouse Shakespeare Ensemble's production and its performance choices highlighted the themes of playful self-exploration. This sense of play was most prominently highlighted in the company's choice of a framing device that—quite appropriately for the themes of open, youthful exploration—set up the performance as a tale being spontaneously recreated by a troupe of girl scouts. The scouts entered the space to hide for a brief game of hide-and-seek, then regrouped in a circle for what became the impetus for one scout to start the story of The Agar, which kicked off the story of the play itself. Once they all joined in, the scouts spread to the corners of the thrust space to gather items, light the playing space with their flashlights, and wait for opportunities to jump in as one of the characters. For a production that was part of the ensemble's "small scale" series—in which the company had only five actors to fill all the play's roles—this framing device proved effective and efficient in both believably answering the technical challenges and further contributing to the production's presentation of playful exploration. The need to rapidly switch between characters was answered by having the scouts use any miscellaneous items that they had on them to turn into the different characters. This effectively justified the doubling and role-switching within the world of the play, but it also took on a whimsical nature, especially with the choice to use whatever the scouts could find—highlights including the use of the zipper of a backpack as the mouth of a god, the use of a book as a hat, and the use of sock puppets to allow actress Rosemary Richards to hold a three-way conversation with herself—in a way that strongly conjured a sense of childlike imagination. Furthermore, these various items signifying characters were frequently passed between performers who would take up the same role if the other had to be somewhere else. This created an impression of spontaneous collaboration in the storytelling that was particularly reminiscent of a childhood playground in the way that it foregrounded a sense of shared imagination. The scouts' joy in these moments, and the way the scouts would observe each other from the outside as they mimicked each other's performances and handed off the story, enabled the spectator to engage in this shared imaginary space. Altogether, this not only added to the...