Jay Gabler

“It’s amazing that three naked people can be so boring,” said my companion as we walked out of (M)imosa/Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church (M) at the Walker Art Center on January 24.

Late in the afternoon of January 16, a group of unusually well-dressed Latina women—ranging from teenagers with braces to self-assured women in their late 20s—could be seen milling about the second floor lobby of the Burnsville Performing Arts Center. “Ooh, a chocolate fountain!” said one, pointing at a corporate event across the lobby. Eventually, they all made their way downstairs, the younger women teetering on their high heels.

Although the opening night performance of Long Day’s Journey Into Night at the Guthrie Theater on January 18 was the first time I’d seen the play performed in full, I have a strange personal history with Eugene O’Neill’s signature classic. When I was a teenager, my school drama coach sent me into competition performing both halves of a confrontation between Edmund Tyrone and his drunken father. Unsurprisingly—given that I was a pimply teenager who had never tippled anything beyond a sip of communion wine—the judges did not find my performance as a superannuated alcoholic to be particularly convincing.

Though it may not sound like one, it's a compliment to the Acting Company's production of As You Like It—now playing in the Guthrie Theater's Dowling Studio—that it made me want to see a different production. What if you cast a male actor to play Rosalind in cross-dressing disguise as Ganymede? The chemistry between this production's Orlando (Joseph Midyett) and Rosalind-in-drag (Elizabeth Stahlmann) is intriguingly high, particularly given Orlando's seeming flirtation with the courtier Le Beau (Michael McDonald). As You Like It, sir.