“A traveller! By my faith, you have great reason to be sad…to have seen much and to have nothing is to have rich eyes and poor hands.” 

Now, look. I love Rosalind. Like, love Rosalind. Playing her is without a doubt a  high point in my career – her dialogue is sparky, her relationships complex, she  is incredibly, fallibly, human, and my daily ritual of deciding which element of her  story to bring my focus to on each particular show is one I always look forward  to. 

I do not always agree with her. 

For example – in Act III, whilst waiting for Orlando to show up for his wooing  lesson, she’s telling Celia about how she ran into her father in the forest – her  banished father she hasn’t seen since he was callously driven out of his home  and rightful dukedom by her uncle, and whom she knows has been living in the  forest but has had no clue of his condition beyond the rumours she’s been  desperately seeking out at court. After describing to Celia how her own father 

didn’t recognise her in her disguise as Ganymede during their long-awaited  reunion, Rosalind then brushes all of that significance off by asking Celia, “what  talk we of fathers when there is such a man as Orlando?”. 

Girl. 

Another point on which we disagree is her view on travel. She scolds Jaques,  telling him that he has “sold his lands to see other men’s” and that that is the  reason why he’s so miserable all the time. She is, notably, neglecting the fact  that she herself isn’t exactly on home turf in the unfamiliar landscape of Arden  

pretending to be a shepherd boy, but that’s neither here nor there. I count myself  incredibly lucky that the acting jobs I’ve taken in the last year have all had an  element of adventure about them, and a brilliant group of cast mates that have  been willing to make the absolute most of those opportunities. Al has told me on  a few occasions that I’ve ‘lived a lot of life’, and I’m glad to be among like minded company. 

The last time we caught up, you found me holed up in a coffee shop in  Arkansas. Our final days at Hendrix were joyous, made so largely by the  wonderful team of students and faculty that worked incredibly hard to not only  make the show so smooth but also to welcome us into their community. We’d  been warned before our final show that we’d be partaking in a Hendrix theatre  tradition once we were finished, which turned out to be an en-masse Hokey  Cokey (and much discussion about how it varies on each side of the pond – they  don’t even “ra-ra-ra”!) paired with perhaps the greatest chocolate chip cookies  I’ve encountered in my storied biscuit-eating career, thanks to tech department  head and all-round wonder woman Lauren. We went out for dinner with Antonio  and Bridgette, our spectacular staff contacts for the week, with most of the  student tech team in tow – our chilled post-show celebration quickly evolved  into karaoke at the bar next door and me introducing anybody who would listen  to me to the wonderful world of mezcal picklebacks. I’d foolishly confided that I  regretted not doing karaoke at White Water Tavern when we’d gone earlier that  week, and found myself suddenly having to put my money where my mouth  was. We all gave it a go bar Benjy, who was otherwise engaged in a pool  tournament with the locals as well as being an incredible hype man whenever  one of us did get up, and I am once again reminded writing this of how grateful I  am to have a team that takes “work hard, play hard” to a level all our own. 

We’d planned a hike for our Sunday off which, as I’m sure you can imagine  based on the previous evening’s antics, was maybe not the wisest move in  terms of self-care. Petit Jean State Park was among our most popular  recommendations when we asked the locals what we should check out, and so  we piled into the cars to make a valiant effort to make it to the waterfall there. 

Summer in this part of the country must be beautiful, but there is something  unique about seeing it in snow, in a quieter season where everything feels stiller  as it begins to come back to life after winter – much mirrored by each of us  emerging from our varying levels of alcohol-induced mental debilitation with  each lungful of mountain air inhaled and icy rock successful navigated. That  evening, we retreated to the Mexican restaurant within spitting distance of our  hotel to watch the Superbowl over vats of tortilla chips. As hangover cures go, I  can recommend a day like this one. 

You currently find me on the Metro back to Winchester, Virginia after venturing  out for a solo Sunday in D.C. to end our week working at Shenandoah  University. I have 20,000 steps and a very poor night’s sleep under my belt, so  I’m a shell of a woman, but there was no way we were going to be this close to  the capitol of this great nation without me seeing what it was all about. It’s  overwhelming, really, just how much ground we all want to cover during our time  in each location. Any spare moments we could snatch between classes and  shows this week have been spent exploring high and low – over state lines, 

across civil war battlefields, to historic houses turned wineries, even into living  rooms on one occasion. One of our wonderful professors for the week, Valerie,  invited us over for pizza and bluegrass music; she and her husband open their  home to local musicians every Wednesday night to jam, and they were kind  

enough to let us sit in after our tech rehearsal. I’m a huge music obsessive, and  seeing these people who may have only met that evening passing melodies  around like it’s second nature was a truly special thing that I think it’s safe to say  we were all moved by. Other excursions included a day out to Harpers Ferry,  planned meticulously by our resident historian, Jo; we drove over the border into  West Virginia blasting John Denver’s Country Roads, looking at the actual Blue  Ridge Mountains on our way to the Shenandoah River. A bucket-list item that I  didn’t know I needed. We climbed to Jefferson’s Rock, so named because the  man himself proclaimed it as a view worth crossing the ocean for – I can see his  point – before hiking a small section of the Appalachian trail, crossing a bridge  that took us over two rivers and into our third state of the day, Maryland. This  was all before noon, as the afternoon was designated for carrying on to  Antietam, site of the bloodiest single-day battle in American history. It’s a  sobering thing, looking out over a view that was the last thing so many people  saw before they died – I don’t know if I anything I could write can do justice to a  feeling like that. 

It was a quieter week on the workshop front – for all we had four shows, we only  had five workshops to plan for, and we decided that it would be a perfect  opportunity to double up and work with each other on the sessions we had on  the roster. Sam and I teamed up for Acting Fundamentals, and I shared a  workshop with the student-run Shakespeare society with Jo. It’s always  incredibly rewarding applying the actor’s toolkit to a study that may not  necessarily seem like an obvious choice to utilise it in – for example, Benjy and I  went into a class last week entitled “Writing In Response to Art”, and were  thrilled at how willingly the students dove head first into work that may feel alien  or daunting – but the enthusiasm that theatre kids have for the work we do is, as  always, potently galvanising. Shenandoah is a conservatory school, and boasts  a staggeringly well-equipped theatre department and students with a real  appetite for as any styles and perspectives on performance as are to be had.  Sam and I put them through their paces in terms of where to begin with building  a character’s physicality and making bold, committed choices, and Jo and I ran  a crash-course on navigating prose and multi-roling. I was incredibly nervous as  to the workshop element to this job however it’s consistently been one of the  parts I’ve looked forward to each week, especially when coupled with the  chance to work with these brilliant, intelligent people beyond the world of the  play we’ve made (but don’t tell them I said that, I don’t want to massage their  egos.)

It’s our second week performing in thrust, and we dedicated time back in  Hendrix to reshaping the performance to accommodate the audience we now  find surrounding us. For all that work carried over well to Shenandoah and  meant we didn’t have to re-stage again, none of us are willing to entirely leave  the director’s chair; the show is very much still malleable, still subject to our  curiosities and refusal to settle for ‘serviceable’. Sam and I checked back in with  the love story between Rosalind and Orlando as we both felt it was losing a bit  of its lustre, and Benjy and Sam have been workshopping the scene between  Touchstone and William as both feel there’s some missing element to it – 

considering I have to make a concerted effort not to corpse in that scene every  show I may be inclined to disagree, but far be it from me to quash the creative  process. Al has been opening ‘all the world’s a stage’ out to cast different  audiences members as each stage of life, and it’s a dream to watch the journey  that he takes the speech on every night. It’s a reminder that for all we keep a  close eye on the play internally, we have to check in with our audiences, too;  what’s landing? What may they be missing? How do we keep them from the  opinion that Shakespeare is fusty and irrelevant and hard to understand? There  are some elements that can’t quite be avoided – for example, a crowd always  seems a little stunned when we go into the jig that ends the play – however it’s a  rewarding feeling to hear the crowd respond well to a moment we may have felt  was a little sticky or circled back to rework. Our final show in Shenandoah was  one of my favourites we’ve done so far; it felt like a real balancing act between  the things we’d revisited and a receptive, eager audience, mostly made up of  students who were spending their Valentine’s Day evening with us. That level of  engagement from a younger crowd is exactly why I love classical work – it’s the  words, exactly as they were said all those hundreds of years ago, but ringing  with fresh meaning and perspective. I got a little emotional during our final  curtain call – it’s this kind of show that made me fall in love with acting and  Shakespeare, and maybe (just maybe) we’ll be that for somebody else.

Somehow, tomorrow we head to Austin to commence our final week in the  States – I’m firmly planting myself in denial for the time being, as I am far from  ready to be finished with this work or this adventure. We already have a to-do  list as long as all ten of our arms put together, each of us pulling the other four  towards a restaurant, a live music venue, a sports event, a hike. I’ll be going  home a more experienced woman than when I left, and I’ll be all the more richer  in so many ways because of it. I hate to disagree with my character, however on  this one occasion I think I have to put my foot down.