Okay, I'm ready to say it--it's hard for me to appreciate a Shakespeare play nowadays. Recently I saw a beauteous production of As You Like It, a play I at least studied in high school, directed by Sam Mendes at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. But unless I read a pretty comprehensive recap of the play, it's hard for me to know what's happening, and frankly, I don't understand what they're talking about a lot of the time. What's with all the "merry this" and "merry that"? And you're too long-winded, Will. In Romeo and Juliet (directed by my idol, Greg Cicchino), there are at least three points where the action stops and someone explains the story so far. Was it because people used to watch the plays while wandering around?

And as a playwright, I'll go even a step further. Back to As You Like It, how would a modern audience, much less a critic, react if the conclusion of a play was a character walking on stage and announcing that all the problems back at the court that caused everyone to flee into the wood in the first place had resolved themselves and you can all come home now, hurrah?