About last night: Love, ardent and otherwise, in the Forest of Arden

How do you like your love?

The Forest of Arden offers all kinds of it — just how you like it — in Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” now in a rollicking run at Hudson Valley Shakespeare in Garrison.

Love at first sight? Love that makes you leap out of your skin? Thoughtful and thought-through love that has considered all the ramifications of love? Unrequited love? Love lost? Love altered? Love between servant and master? Sisterly love? Love delayed? Love you don’t reciprocate? Love that makes you wonder who you are? Love you feel you don’t deserve?

This being a story set among shepherds, there is also love of goats.

It’s all there and more on the stage at the spectacular new home of Hudson Valley Shakespeare, an open-air pavilion that elevates all in the play directed by Miriam Laube with original songs penned by Amanda Denhert. (Also in repertory are “King Lear” and, starting Aug. 12, “Les Miserables.”)

The story is all over the place, but it’s enough to know that it involves a bad duke and a good duke, an evil brother and a sincere younger brother, banishment to the Forest of Arden, sister-cousins who love each other, and the story’s heroine, Rosalind, disguising herself as a boy named Ganymede.

In Arden, far from the stuffy and fake court, things are authentic and all are welcome, and love is love is love is love.

As Rosalind, one of Shakespeare’s best defined female characters despite being dressed as a man, Helen Cespedes is a revelation, by turns flighty and coy, steadfast and flustered, defiant and in a swoon. She is her own person, whichever person she is playing, in a calculated and winning portrayal, as Cespedes regularly drops her mask as Ganymede to reveal the inner Rosalind. The clothes may make the man, but there’s a woman’s beating heart behind the doublet.

Take, for example, when Celia (the excellent Safiya Harris in a portrayal of depth and heart) challenges Rosalind’s love for Orlando.

Rosalind replies: “O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in love! But it cannot be sounded. My affection hath an unknown bottom, like the Bay of Portugal.”

Here, Cespedes drops to the floor and pretends to swim in her love, first a crawl and then flipping over to the backstroke.

She’s got it bad. And it’s so good.

There are other flashes of invention and genius here, as in the wrestling match when the hilarious Mateo Parodi as Charles battles the smaller Keshav Moodliar as Orlando, complete with slow-mo falls right out of the WWE or “The Matrix.”

Moodliar proves himself adept at the physical comedy of the wrestling match, the wordplay of a man in the full throes of love, and the sincere love for a fallen servant.

In a testament to the power of seeing shows in summer repertory, 24 hours earlier Moodliar prowled the stage as the scheming bastard-child Edmund in “King Lear” and that servant, Kurt Rhoads, played the slipping-away sovereign. Cespedes played the conniving middle daughter, Regan.

But 24 hours later, tragedy is on the shelf and it is comedy tonight.

Zack Fine as the delightfully head-over-heels Silvius and the exceptional Melissa Mahoney as his not-feeling-it Phoebe practically blow the brand-new roof off the Scripps Center when they take the stage in a high-energy scene that conjures Pepe LePew.

Silvius prances and leaps at the thought of his love while she fires imaginary arrows to just get him to stop, already. While he may not be winning Phoebe at the moment, he has won the hearts of the audience.

When Cespedes (as Ganymede) enters the fray to upbraid the unfeeling Phoebe, an arrow-straight line becomes a delicious triangle.

Likewise, a quartet of the unrequited — Silvius for Phoebe, Phoebe for Ganymede, Orlando for Rosalind and Ganymede “for no woman” — is beautifully staged and performed at an appropriately breakneck speed that ratchets up the comedy to a fever pitch in another of the night’s most indelible moments.

What is love without a song in your heart? Amanda Denhert’s original songs add to the action, giving voice to characters’ innermost thoughts.

Denhert’s most affecting song comes late in the action, when Celia mourns the exclusivity of the love she once shared with her cousin, Rosalind. The two had been inseparable, sharing a secrets with their hearts open wide, until Rosalind’s love for Orlando changes that.

“I wish I’d never come to this forest,” Celia sings. “I somehow feel undone. For Rosalind you have forgotten the love that has made us one.”

This being a comedy, all ends with everyone getting exactly their hearts desire, including Sean McNall as the melancholy Jaques, who departs to live a life monastic, not begrudging the others their joy.

“So to your pleasures,” he says. “I am for other than dancing measures.”

It is just as he likes it.