At a welcome breakfast last year, newly appointed theatre & dance professor Emmy Weldon met English professor Nathan Snaza, who curated the Tucker-Boatwright Festival for Literature & the Arts on campus this year.

“He told me he wanted to do a Shakespeare play as a featured event of the festival, and I said, ‘Well, you know, Nathan, I’ve always wanted to do a Shakespeare set out of trash,’” Weldon said.

Snaza loved the idea, and Weldon’s dream was realized in February with the premiere of “As You Liked It,” a spinoff of the Shakespearean version. The storyline for this rendition is based on an environmental theme, which meant that the props and costumes would be made from recycled materials.

Preparing the set was a campus-wide event, with the construction of a 15-foot tree. The tree trunk was built first, with students creating bark for the tree from torn pieces of cardboard, each piece adorned with students’ handwritten messages and artwork. 

“I’ve read all the messages put on the tree,” said sophomore Leah Marchetti, a business administration major who helped construct the set. “I think it’s a really fun way for people to express themselves and for everyone to get involved in one specific project.”

As she attached a piece of paper bark with a glue gun, she said ‘Love wins’ was her favorite message on the tree.

“You cannot even see the first few layers of bark that were put onto the tree. It has so much build-up that there are hidden messages in it,” Weldon said.

Students constructed the leaves primarily from National Geographic magazine pages dating from the 1970s to the 1990s. “Students went through about 50 magazines and pulled out any pages with images of nature,” Weldon said. “Students from my Intro to Scenery class in the fall developed leaf-shaped stencils made from plastic packaging waste.”

The team also collected unused giveaway T-shirts donated by Rethink Waste that they cut into long strips, then plaited them into mats at a weaving station in the Humanities Commons. Students connected the mats to create a hedge.

The play took place in Tyler Haynes Commons, with floor-to-ceiling windows providing a natural, forested backdrop — the external views a stark contrast to the props on stage composed solely of the tree and the hedge in its portrayal of the Forest of Arden.

“Normally, we would make maybe three trees to represent a forest. But in our dystopian version of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, nature is essentially absent,” Weldon said.

University of Bristol exchange student Isaac Reeves worked on the set. “Using the waste from the UR campus to create the set required both innovation and expertise. Having come from Bristol, where I have primarily been an actor, my experience with set design was limited,” said Reeves. “Once Emmy took me in, originally as a helper with props, I was made aware of the intricacies and details that the set for this production demanded.”

Reeves, who arrived in January for a semester, was soon drawn into the play to act alongside players from Richmond Shakespeare.

The actors’ wardrobes were also made from recycled items. “One of our dresses is made out of a shower curtain, another from a tablecloth,” Weldon said. “Our duke is in a Harry Potter blanket that’s been turned into a poncho.”

Weldon hopes the play will inspire people to make greener choices.

“One of the things I've been saying the whole time is we can't just do a play, right? The play has to be the turning point for conversation and then action.”