Peter Hall has done Shakespeare the immense service of letting him be. His staging of “As You Like It,” which opened for an American run last night at the BAM Harvey, is plainly the work of a director who has learned to leave well enough alone. Such is the wisdom gained from 50 years in the business.

Sir Peter’s production reminds you that in the old days nobody went to see a play; they went to hear a play. His modern-dress staging is spare, tasteful, restrained. Seek all you like for brilliant tableaux or ingenious stage business – you won’t find them. (Not that there’s anything wrong with brilliant tableaux or ingenious stage business: Sir Peter’s son Edward flashed plenty of both in last season’s dazzling “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”)

There are no particular tricks, no radical revisions. Sir Peter doesn’t foreground the homoeroticism that may lurk between Rosalind and her friend Celia, or between brave Orlando and Ganymede (who is really Rosalind in disguise). In fact, he all but runs away from these fashionable pursuits; a thousand gender-studies majors will leave this show heartbroken. The show even abjures grand scene changes, not even when the action shifts from the confines of the Duke’s court to the expansive woods does vast stage machinery appear. Trees float down, singly or in pairs, so gently you might miss them.

What you don’t miss is the depth and complexity of Shakespeare’s writing. We owe Sir Peter thanks for reminding us that, beneath all its comedy, “As You Like It” is a play of ideas. Silvius, the lovesick shepherd, finds some marvelous, improbable eloquence in defining what it means to be in love. Sir Peter puts him at center stage, as if delivering a lecture, or imparting an idea:

It is to be all made of fantasy,
All made of passion and all made of wishes,
All adoration, duty, and observance,
All humbleness, all patience and impatience,
All purity, all trial, all observance;

Another idea pops up when, in a speech of Rosalind’s, Shakespeare beat Einstein to relativity by 300 years: “Time travels in divers paces with divers persons.”

This deeply respectable approach to “As You Like It” has one shortcoming: It robs the show of much of its comedy. You admire what Sir Peter has done (and resisted doing), and you marvel that you – yes, you – belong to the same species as William Shakespeare. But this is not the same as having fun. The production is never less than pleasant, but only rarely a delight. (I’m not counting unintentional hilarity, as when the courtiers of the crypto-fascist Duke Frederick begin storming around in their black shirts and black berets, partaking ever so slightly of a Parisian cafe’s beefy clientele.)

The most reliable source of delight is Rosalind. Here is a girl battling her excesses. She is too tall, too smart, possessed of too many words, and she knows it. Rebecca Hall brings to the role an affecting awkwardness. Better, she has two of the liveliest eyes in town. I don’t think you can teach an actress to have fantastically expressive eyes, which can amplify or qualify what she says – you’re either born with them or you’re not.

So here again we praise Sir Peter, who is the father of his young leading lady. What goes on around that dinner table? (A skit begging to be written: Competitive charades at the Hall family manor.)

***

One day, scientists say, the intrepid droids prowling around Mars will cease transmitting images of that strange world. We in the theater know how that moment will feel. After 37 years, Richard Foreman has announced he will no longer stage full productions of new plays.

For four decades, the tiny Ontological-Hysteric Theater has been the home of Mr. Foreman’s annual exercise in the metaphysically surreal. (His new departure marks another setback for the once-lively spirit of the East Village: first Joey Ramone, then the Freakatorium, now this.) Like many holdovers from the 1960s avant-garde, Mr. Foreman’s work has been plenty strange, but unlike his downtown contemporaries, he never felt mannered – not in my experience, anyway.

He has lasted so long because of a method no one has mastered so well: He comments on the world we inhabit by exploring the one inside his head. Patterns, symbols, and methods may recur from year to year – the deadpan delivery; the bears, pirates, and baby dolls; the wires across the stage – but each show has felt like a fresh trip into some inexhaustible unknown. Could it be that after four decades we have seen no more of Mr. Foreman’s mental landscape than Spirit and Opportunity have glimpsed of Mars?

If Mr. Foreman isn’t kidding about trading theater for mixed media and film (and Mr. Foreman is a funny man – he may be kidding), then his last show is “The Gods Are Pounding My Head! (AKA Lumberjack Messiah).” In a program he note he calls it a “very elegiac play.” It’s not a way of life that he wishes to mourn, but a way of mind: The old notion that education meant constructing a kind of cathedral of knowledge in your head. Computers, networks, and a civilization turned hasty, he believes, have turned us into “pancake people” – simple, transparent, and thin.

Gone, Mr. Foreman believes, are the heroic geniuses who would, “like lumberjacks,” clear the world of old custom and belief, and create the new. The new play shows us two such lumberjacks, adrift in a world that doesn’t need them anymore. Another casualty of Mr. Foreman’s departure will be the end of the brilliant partnership of Smith & Smith. T. Ryder Smith plays a wry lumberjack with a brogue, who is called Frenchie. He has the air of a Romantic poet fallen on hard times, and doesn’t even perk up when a pair of stone tablets falls into his arms. Jay Smith plays Dutch, a mournful sort of woodsman. He delivers his lines quietly, chin cocked to the ceiling. He is also a large man – much larger than his castmate – which makes him seem a sensitive lug, in the Gandolfini mode.

Gnomic symbols abound: a combination car/locomotive, the heart of the world (it’s the size of a side of beef), Alfred Lord Tennyson. Sometimes the lumberjacks look like the Bruces from Monty Python, at others they seem like Beckett’s Didi and Gogo. (“I’m going to, I’m going to,” is a refrain.) But I like them best when they evoke Hope and Crosby. Their Dorothy Lamour is Charlotta Mohlin, a young Swedish actress whom Mr. Foreman discovered at a lunch counter around the corner. As Maude, she has pale eyes and secrets.

Sure, Dutch and Frenchie will take an ax to the floor and the furniture, but it doesn’t really get them anywhere. Symbols of decay abound. There are skulls on the wall and mushrooms underfoot. Even the playground slide, a major scenic element, was plainly chosen as a metaphor for descent. (Unless it was not chosen as a metaphor for descent, and Mr. Foreman just put it there because it looks cool – it works either way.)

The show doesn’t have quite the coiled power of some of its predecessors. It loses its way, I think, during Frenchie’s soliloquy about turning himself inside out, about mirrors and sunlight. It’s part of the genius of Foreman that even when the writing slips, you may notice another flourish in his meticulously haphazard world. Above the stage hang a handful of birds on the wing. In a play about endings, they bring to mind the dove sent by Noah in search of dry land. Most just hang there, but look again: One of them has a twig.

“As You Like It” until January 30 (651 Fulton Street, between Ashland Place and Rockwell Place, 718-636-4100).

“The Gods” (131 E. 10th Street, at Second Avenue, 212-533-4650).